Game Programmers Versus Game Designers
One of the major differences I've noticed between working in the mainstream games biz now versus when I started *cough*thirteen*cough* years ago is the amount of work that goes into making the entire game very data-driven.

Maybe it's just the companies I worked for then, versus the ones I work for now. But it seems that the trick companies are using to help scale projects is put more burden on designers for creating the data, scripting solutions, and so forth. Not that this is new. We put a ton of effort into scripting in Outwars back in '97, after all, and even Twisted Metal and Warhawk had tons of parameters for the designers to play with. It just seems like a greater amount of emphasis.

What this means, from a programmer's perspective, is that you can write the most pristine, perfect, bug-free, wonderful code in the world - and its still gonna be turned into utter buggy crap by some designer's script or data when they don't know what parameter X is supposed to do. And the programmer is gonna get the blame by default. It's just our lot in life.

Of course, that assumes pristine and perfect code. You can ask the designers that work with me, and they'll let you know in no uncertain terms that my programming isn't in the same zip code as "pristine and perfect." We'll go back and forth, of course, about how I implemented the code in only twenty minutes because said designers suddenly decided they absolutely needed a feature only three hours before the milestone was due.

That's life in the games biz. Hey, on my indie project, I do 95% of the work at the design-level, through the built-in scripting language and all that, so I'm in the same boat. I can empathize. But I still turn into crotchety old programmer guy at work. It's just how things are expected to roll. Who am I to fight tradition?

Oh, right, I'm an indie. I buck tradition all the time. Okay. So I don't think I'm all that crotchety. And I'm not old! Except maybe in the eyes of some of the kids in the QA department who think Playstation 2 games are "retro." But I digress...

Things get more interesting. Not only is there a weird joint-custody relationship over stuff that makes the game run, but the designers are... well... creative. By their very nature, designers get very creative in the use of whatever tools you give them. We joke about bugs being "undocumented features," but sometimes a designer will find and take advantage of a bug. Truly use it as a feature. Sometimes they'll have no clue they are using some unwanted side-effect to make their mission work. And then they'll get mad when the bug finally gets fixed, because they'll have two levels that depended upon that broken functionality. They'll have written sixteen scripts that force this weird bug to happen because its just a cool effect, and then as a programmer you have to purposefully re-implement the bug in a more controlled, parameterized fashion to make 'em happy.

Not that game designers are ever happy. For more than a few minutes at a time, anyway, after they get a shiny new toy. It's like a genetic impossibility or something. Or something they learn in game designer school (they've got those now, these young punks... oh, wait, there's the crotchety old programmer guy thing emerging again...)

The solution, naturally, is keeping good communication going between the designers and programmers. Which can cause nightmares for some managers, because unbridled communication leads to feature creep and priorities getting knocked out of whack. Because programmers love giving designers shiny new toys to play with. If not out of the goodness of our hearts, it's out of the pains in our necks. Which means the solution to one nightmare leads to another set of nightmares.

Have I mentioned that game development is kinda hard?


(Vaguely) related old game programmer crotchetiness...
* On Game Engines and Swarm Missiles
* My Worst Bug Ever
* Jet Moto Memories
* Losing Your Limits Without Losing Your Mind
* Why Software Design Isn't Like Architecture
.

Labels: Game Design, programming

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:17 AM (Permalink)