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Bridging the Gap Between Art and Code In Games
Gamasutra posted an article written by Jason Hayes, a developer for Volition Inc., which is known for its production of the Saint's Row, FreeSpace, and Red Faction series. Hayes discusses the division between graphical artists and coders, who often clash because their aims are so disparate and their areas of expertise do not necessarily overlap. It has caused some companies, such as Volition, to develop an intermediary "technical artist" to find a balance between the two.
"Integrating technical artists into a studio frees up the programmers from being solely responsible for the development and maintenance of the game's tools and pipelines. While programmers still have a hand in the design (and sometimes implementation) of those tools and pipelines, the technical artist is the driving force behind them and is looking out for the best interests of both parties."
...they should fuse the marketing department with the sales force. Errr, never mind, I'm not sure we would want to see that critter...
The head of Disney-Pixar Animation, Ed Catmull, talked about the same issues in filmmaking last week. He was concerned with balance between artists, technologists and production staff (schedulers) in maximizing creativity and get movies out.
they are the same now days with unpaid overtime and no comp time to make up for it.
"Hayes discusses the division between graphical artists and coders, who often clash because their aims are so disparate and their areas of expertise do not necessarily overlap."
Really?
Have you seen this game?
The clash comes because of EGOs, it's as simple as that.
This sounds like a go-nowhere position... A better solution would be the artists being sent off for a class or two in programming so they *understand* when the programmers tell them that they're asking for something unrealistic given the timeframe.
I actually read the article and it seems to me that the 'technical artists' are just artists put in the engineering department to roughly understand what is going on (according to the article "Most technical artists, by today's standards, come from an artistic background and favor the use of dynamic scripting languages such as MaxScript or Mel.") and act as a mediator between the artists and coders. If that is what they do, it seems inefficient to have them in that capacity and looks to a patch to cover up a bad management strategy.
I can't exactly say I'm extremely experienced, but I do actually work in the games industry and I've never encountered this strange divide between programmers and graphics artists.
Programmers should be given a task to implement and then left to go and do it. They might design a way TO implement that task, but even this isn't ideal and is the kind of thing the development lead should be doing.
The graphics artists, likewise, should be given tasks to accomplish with strict limits (i.e. "I want a big red barn with a slightly curved roof that's no more than 800 triangles") that should be set and maintained by the graphics lead.
Then all that's left is the design of the game itself, which comes down to whoever is the lead designer who is the real middleman between the programmers and the artists.
He's the one that sits down and outlines exactly what it is he wants to achieve, the Programmer lead will tell him what is and isn't possible from a technical level and the graphics artist will tell him just how closely his vision can be matched. There really is no need for this "technical artist" and I can only imagine his role being somewhat counterproductive as the whole game relies on him having a good understanding of technical limitations AND artistry limitations, which is unlikely. He may have a basic understanding of both, or even an advanced understanding of one, but few people can master both fields.
Then again, it can't be any worse than Valve's "lets let everyone have a say and spend months debating which is best" approach and they tend to get good results.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Code is art, therefore art is code. There, fix'd it for you.
I actually just happened to install Freespace 2 the other day. The code is open and works great on linux, and for that matter the game data itself is freely redistributable. I highly recommend everyone check it out.
Only one problem I found, the java based FS2 installer seems to grab the 64 bit build of fs2_open. You may have to replace it with a manually downloaded 32 bit fs2_open. Enjoy!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I worked for the Evil Empire (aka EA) for 2 years as a technical artist. There's nothing *new* about this field -- certainly EA went through the hassle of categorizing the discipline into levels one through five.
I wrote many, many scripts in Maya, as well as other scripting languages. Three of the technical artists I worked with had Engineering degrees. NONE of us actually did any "artwork" per se.
Much of a game is art-driven (hell, most of some games) and it's helpful, esp. early on, to have a technical artist help define the feature set for a game and determine how it can be implemented. Artists generally want to do art -- thankfully, there is this niche of [technical] artists who's role it is to allow the artists to do ART and allow programmers to not have to learn something like Max or Maya and focus on the engine.
I am an environment artist for a big UK game developer.
In my opinion, the creation of hybrid roles like this is basically inevitable. The depth of knowledge and skill needed for each part of the development process is deepening all the time as technology rolls forward and graphics increase in fidelity. A handfull of people can no longer make big AAA titles between them, not just because of the size and scope of modern games and the amount of content / code that needs to be done, but because of the depth of knowledge required in each role.
In the end, you WANT a game to be made by people that are each specialists in their area. Coder's that write awesome code and artists that make lovely artwork. Increasingly people have less understanding of the other parts of development because they are so heavily invested in their own areas and don't have time for anything else. Hybrid jobs are inevitable because someone needs to understand enough of each field to keep things running smoothly, and keep proper requirements for tools, code and art assets heading in the direction of each part of the team.
This is especially the case if you are making a big game, which requires lots of custom tools and tools support. The knowledge require by each person means those producing the code or artwork itself, almost never have enough understanding of the other side of development to mesh together perfectly, there are too many misunderstandings about requirements and limitations to let people sit in their own camps all day, someone has to go between. Our lead technical artist is one of the most important people on the team.