The game "Programmer" Fact or Fiction?
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I've been working on/with a video game now for 3 years and another one previously for 2 years. And I am of the belief that the majority of what happens under the hood in game development is not "Programming" at least not in the sense that the majority of people would believe it to be. Where I'm sitting at, there is a lot of code, don't get me wrong, but a lot of houses have their own engines or third party engines which do most of the heavy lifting, and the House spends the bulk of their time ans assets on developing content and graphics, and graphical content, and models, and themes, and plot...oh my. :doh: So am I the only one who feels this way? :confused:
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio...At first glance it looked like JSOP's post, because of your signature... :)
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I've been working on/with a video game now for 3 years and another one previously for 2 years. And I am of the belief that the majority of what happens under the hood in game development is not "Programming" at least not in the sense that the majority of people would believe it to be. Where I'm sitting at, there is a lot of code, don't get me wrong, but a lot of houses have their own engines or third party engines which do most of the heavy lifting, and the House spends the bulk of their time ans assets on developing content and graphics, and graphical content, and models, and themes, and plot...oh my. :doh: So am I the only one who feels this way? :confused:
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio...That seems to be the trend, unless you're making a completely new type of game... I'm not actually in that industry, but I keep an eye on parts of it, and it seems to be rare to find a development house that uses their own engine. The only one I can think of is Natural Selection 2, which was originally going to run on the Source engine (Half Life 2) but decided to roll their own instead. Look at how many engines are out there already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines[^] With that kind of selection, there's usually going to be one that fits your needs.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels) -
I've been working on/with a video game now for 3 years and another one previously for 2 years. And I am of the belief that the majority of what happens under the hood in game development is not "Programming" at least not in the sense that the majority of people would believe it to be. Where I'm sitting at, there is a lot of code, don't get me wrong, but a lot of houses have their own engines or third party engines which do most of the heavy lifting, and the House spends the bulk of their time ans assets on developing content and graphics, and graphical content, and models, and themes, and plot...oh my. :doh: So am I the only one who feels this way? :confused:
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio...I just realized that your sig format is very similar to JSOP's. You aren't one in the same are you? ;)
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I've been working on/with a video game now for 3 years and another one previously for 2 years. And I am of the belief that the majority of what happens under the hood in game development is not "Programming" at least not in the sense that the majority of people would believe it to be. Where I'm sitting at, there is a lot of code, don't get me wrong, but a lot of houses have their own engines or third party engines which do most of the heavy lifting, and the House spends the bulk of their time ans assets on developing content and graphics, and graphical content, and models, and themes, and plot...oh my. :doh: So am I the only one who feels this way? :confused:
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio...The actual programming portion of game development isn't that huge it's true, but there are so many different independent areas that the same could really be said about any of them. If you wanted to purely compare assets vs programming then it really would depend on the game, and when I say assets I mean graphics and sound not the actual game design and story that's really a whole other area.
My current favourite phrase: I've seen better!
-SK Genius
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That's how it works - look at the credits for any top line game, not many programmers seeem to be involved.
That may be true, but they do a larger portion of the work compared to some other groups. In film credits you may see the leading actors and then all the extras, just because there are more extras it doesn't mean they represent a larger portion of the man hours put in. Still, an example of some game credits: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_developers[^] I was looking for Fallout: New Vegas as that's just come out but I found this first. It's quite likely that the developers put in a lot more time than the localization teams, for example.
My current favourite phrase: I've seen better!
-SK Genius
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I've been working on/with a video game now for 3 years and another one previously for 2 years. And I am of the belief that the majority of what happens under the hood in game development is not "Programming" at least not in the sense that the majority of people would believe it to be. Where I'm sitting at, there is a lot of code, don't get me wrong, but a lot of houses have their own engines or third party engines which do most of the heavy lifting, and the House spends the bulk of their time ans assets on developing content and graphics, and graphical content, and models, and themes, and plot...oh my. :doh: So am I the only one who feels this way? :confused:
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio...There are definitely a lot of game engines/middleware out there. CriWare, Rendersoft, Unreal Engine, Crytek, Havok, etc. Nothing like firing up a game on the console or PC and sitting through several screens of the logos. One game I have for the PS3 has at least 6 such screens (rendering engines, physics engines, audio libraries) before you actually get to the title screen for the game. Sometimes you can skip past them with the Start button, but others force you to sit through them. It does seem like the work is all art, sound and other asset development at times. However, there is still significant development done on the average game. Still have to build the actual game engine that can talk to the middleware, develop the event scripting, and such. As you probably are aware. :) What type of game are you building? I have a soft spot for the old CRPGs along the lines of Wizardry and Ultima. I've had some ideas along those lines (a souped up version of The Bard's Tale Construction Set would be awesome, heh), but I don't have the development skills to do it myself. *sigh* Flynn
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I've been working on/with a video game now for 3 years and another one previously for 2 years. And I am of the belief that the majority of what happens under the hood in game development is not "Programming" at least not in the sense that the majority of people would believe it to be. Where I'm sitting at, there is a lot of code, don't get me wrong, but a lot of houses have their own engines or third party engines which do most of the heavy lifting, and the House spends the bulk of their time ans assets on developing content and graphics, and graphical content, and models, and themes, and plot...oh my. :doh: So am I the only one who feels this way? :confused:
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio...http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/90/why-is-so-hard-to-develop-a-mmo/239#239[^] World of Warcraft has: 5,500,000 – Lines of code 1,500,000 – Art assets 33,681 – Production tasks 70,167 – Spells 37,537 – NPCs (non-player characters) 27 – Hours of music 2600 – Quests in the original World of Warcraft 2700+ - Additional quests in WoW: The Burning Crusade 2350+ - Additional quests in WoW: Wrath of the Lich King 7650+ - Quests total (how many have you finished?) 4,449,680,399 – Achievements earned by players since their implementation (this figure is already a few days old, and therefore outdated) Patches: 4.7– Petabytes (4700 terabytes) of data delivered to players through patches 126 – Different versions issued of every patch, including those streamed to players and issued as self-extracting executables Half – Of every patch’s size is audio Servers: 13,250 – Server blades running WoW servers, with a total of 75,000 – CPU cores, and 112.5 – Terabytes of RAM Support: 179,184 – Bugs tracked by Blizzard (most of which have been fixed, according to the presenters) 2,056 – Game masters 340 – Employees in the billing department 2,584 – Total customer service employees International: 10 – Languages into which WoW is translated Blizzard Online: 12,000,000+ – Battle.net accounts 900,000+ - Files on WorldofWarcraft.com
Todd Smith
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I have been involoved in some game dev in the past and i have to agree with you 100%. It seems that game engine dev is becoming more and more a specialised field, with companies using off the shelf engines rather than developing their own. With the great quality and feature rich engines available today, it makes complete business sense to go that route. BTW, do you have a demo of your game? Would like to have a look.
Not yet.... I will be posting some random (very old) screen shots up on my site.. but they are very basic and much more proof of concept then anything else... I've fallen into the Scripted AI hole about a year ago, which i am just now starting to see the light of day on. :doh: I'll permalink this thread and post here again shortly so you can see...
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio... -
Not in my experience, it goes in waves for me. I just spent the last 4 months feverishly coding and testing some low level networking crap. Now some more mundane winforms development interlaced with meetings and analysis. Then again I am one of the senior devs at a software publisher ... depends on where you work I should imagine.
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The company I work for, has had me coding between 50 hrs a week, and 20 for the last year or so.. fairly steady usually in the 45+ area... Which lends little time for side projects...
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio... -
ely_bob wrote:
So am I the only one who feels this way?
Haven't been in the industry in 15 years, but I agree. In fact, I was just noticing a couple days ago that even what I do (currently, satellite design software) involves a lot of DB architecture, identifying UI patterns and other business logic patterns, handling errors (constraints and stuff coming from the DB) gracefully for the user, optimizing queries and client-side tasks, etc. Almost all of this (even how the SQL optimizations are specified) is generic. There actually is very little domain-specific code being written, and the code that is being written sits in "plug in" assemblies. That's the way it should be, right? Marc
Marc Clifton wrote:
"plug in" assemblies. That's the way it should be, right?
.. Should be.. but I don't think that is really they way Code is used anymore...about every 5 years someone says.. hey lets overhaul this library.. they throw almost everything away, implement whatever is :"current best practices" and then move on.. and only rarely use the library for anything other then it's original intended purpose. IMO.
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio... -
At first glance it looked like JSOP's post, because of your signature... :)
Thanks.. It is a Homage.... I think it looks snappy... ;P
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio... -
That seems to be the trend, unless you're making a completely new type of game... I'm not actually in that industry, but I keep an eye on parts of it, and it seems to be rare to find a development house that uses their own engine. The only one I can think of is Natural Selection 2, which was originally going to run on the Source engine (Half Life 2) but decided to roll their own instead. Look at how many engines are out there already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines[^] With that kind of selection, there's usually going to be one that fits your needs.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels)Ian Shlasko wrote:
unless you're making a completely new type of game...
.. which I hope that I am. I agree however between some of the prices and flexability, the potential for customization is small (IMO :^) ) and the learning curve seems to be great (often poorly documented or tutorialized) which is almost worse than poorly written code. Not to mention the plethora of cross compatibility issues and hit to performance which could arise if you attempt to use a graphics engine, physics engine and AI engine which are not made by the same (expensive) company....
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio... -
I just realized that your sig format is very similar to JSOP's. You aren't one in the same are you? ;)
Nope.. and proud of it... :laugh:
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio... -
There are definitely a lot of game engines/middleware out there. CriWare, Rendersoft, Unreal Engine, Crytek, Havok, etc. Nothing like firing up a game on the console or PC and sitting through several screens of the logos. One game I have for the PS3 has at least 6 such screens (rendering engines, physics engines, audio libraries) before you actually get to the title screen for the game. Sometimes you can skip past them with the Start button, but others force you to sit through them. It does seem like the work is all art, sound and other asset development at times. However, there is still significant development done on the average game. Still have to build the actual game engine that can talk to the middleware, develop the event scripting, and such. As you probably are aware. :) What type of game are you building? I have a soft spot for the old CRPGs along the lines of Wizardry and Ultima. I've had some ideas along those lines (a souped up version of The Bard's Tale Construction Set would be awesome, heh), but I don't have the development skills to do it myself. *sigh* Flynn
Flynn Arrowstarr / Regular Schmoe wrote:
(a souped up version of The Bard's Tale Construction Set would be awesome, heh),
Sorta.... I did like that one... The long term idea is massive, but I'm starting out with something "small" enough that I can complete it, but large enough that it will be something people will want to play... Currently using XNA, so you should expect to see me posting in the subject from time to time. Basically I'm going for a first person RPG (as best as i can) we'll see where it will go from there... there will be some "town management" type stuff, but mostly killing of goblins.
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
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"The conversations he was having with himself were becoming ominous."-.. On the radio...