Anatomy of Game Development

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an article titled Game Development: Harder Than You Think that looks at the complexities of creating a modern game, in comparison with the relative simplicity of doing so ten years ago. My understanding of the industry is that they have too many designers and not enough programmers. From the article: 'Now the primary technical challenge is simply getting the code to work to produce an end result that bears some semblance to the desired functionality... There's such a wide variety of algorithms to know about, so much experience required to implement them in a useful way, and so much work overall that just needs to be done, that we have a perpetual shortage of qualified people in the industry.'"

Comments

Fucking wah!

[shplorb]

Ok, I'm new in the industry - approaching 6 months - so my opinion probably doesn't count much.

To me, this guy is a whining little bitch. What the hell is a "Gaming Development Consultant" anyway? Just look at how overly-complex those spaghetti diagrams are!

The company that I work at is apparently rather advanced in our development methodology and stuff compared to other companies. Quite simply, everything we do in our process of development just makes sense to me - I don't know how anyone couldn't do it the way we do it.

1/2 an hour to do a build? So? I only have to do a clean build maybe once a week at the most (and that's usually because VC starts playing silly buggers with dependencies and stuff), unless I'm working on a core component of the engine - like the string or array classes - but they shouldn't need to be touched once their written. Yes, you have to build and test your code on all the target platforms before comitting - but come on - you don't have to do a clean build for that! You can compile for PC and Xbox on your workstation while a build server or your tool does the PS2 one.

Modularising your code is key, develop re-usable components. This is what's preached in software engineering and it applies just as much to games. Profiling is not hard either - build profiling functionality into your code and use that in combination with external tools like the PS2 PA.

Yeah, games are hard because they're always on the cutting edge and evolving, but use some common sense when laying down your initial engine and component designs and it should all be pretty easy to manage as long as everyone knows what the score is. Communication is vital.

That there's not enough programmers and too many designers/artists is bullshit too, well, only if you're using a pre-built engine. Games are content-centric now... you need way more artists and designers than coders these days. Having a good workflow for them is essential in order for them to be productive. This entails writing plugins for apps like 3dsmax and photoshop to convert to the interal formats, and to have a quick and easy way to get the content into the game and tweak it. This is another area where the company I work at excels in.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Enough of this crap, I'm going outside for a walk.

Re:Lua

[Bob of Dole]

Ugh. Lua.
It might be OO & integrate with C fine, but it's still BASIC style language.
It tries to be a "Programming Language for Non-Programmers!".
The problem is most people who are actually going to consider using Lua ARE programmers. Trying to force them to use 1-based arrays and such isn't a great idea.