I really agree with this article. Knowing how the whole system fits together is essential in my opinion. I guess we need both generalists and specialists
Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
91–100 of 114 posts
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would go further and say that most companies would prefer to solve issues via specializing instead of generalizing. For example, if there is a quality problem most products would hire someone with QA experience or create a QA team instead of increasing general QA competence. It's just a more tangible solution, even if not always the best one.
It's much simpler to hire a separate team to cope with a dev team's lack of QA than to convince that dev team that they should test things.
makes sense from that structure. Dev is already busy with one job, they won't get a raise to also get some QA learning on the side. So there's in fact negative incentive to pick up more responsibility, even if that dev does in fact know QA (unless you own stock in the studio. But that's still a stretch).
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s rare that Indie games are the same technical sophistication though. Nothing wrong with them at all but the scale is just totally different, it’s like running a small bakery shop vs an industrial factory churning out bread for supermarkets
Yes, of course there is a trade-off. The specialists are likely much better at executing their particular functions. However, they still compete for the same market, sometimes surprisingly well. AAA games constantly feel like an art gallery where you are there to appreciate the beauty, while indie games have this soul and cohesion that is likely boosted by generalists as described in the article.
too bad most souls end up lying around on the street, begging others to turn back and avoid the terrible fate befallen on them. It's always rough selling your vision to others, and games are no different in terms entrepreneurship.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure it's a good example... Stardew Valley as a technical feat is pretty average, there's nothing fancy. In fact the game could have been made 20 years ago with this looks. Comparing it to AAA is really far from the truth, because modern 3D game dev is much much much more complicated.
I explicitly alluded to that: that it's indie and simpler. > Which, it's an indie game... but clearly if he can do the whole project himself, someone on a AAA team can have cross-disciplinary skills and translate. But if one man can do 100% of an indie game, surely you can end up with a few people who are generalists on a AAA game team that are deep in one area and basically competent in another couple to act as lias…
>if he can do the whole project himself, someone on a AAA team can have cross-disciplinary skills and translate.
It's a scaling problem. Similar to how single theaded, multi-threading, and distributed computing all have different schemes to solve the same problem, so does a single/small team vs. a studio of hundreds of devs. You won't get a satisfactory output if you use a single threaded technique to solve a problem requiring distributed scale. You'll either take prohibitively long, and/or produce the wrong/redundant results as solutions clash into each other with no syncronization.
I think instead of trying to fit more generalists into a AAA pipeline, we should encourage more generalists to optimize for a small team and deliver leaner projects that can still turn heads.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you say that the game is well made of many of its core systems are defective?
If the implementation of a poor algorithm is robust and bug-free, that would be something that is well-made, despite being bad. Consider a chair that is sturdy and load-bearing, while still being lightweight, but it wildly uncomfortable to sit on.
But they're describing a poor and buggy implementation.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I dont work for anyone but my customers. There is no way I would deal with the kind of dissonance we are living through today. I do all my design work, my coding, my deduction for people that hire me directly for individual projects. I don't make as much money as I would working for a company, but you can't put a price on piece of mind.
Do you have any tips or resources on how to find individual consumers?
From my experience it seems that there is more work in this space than there is people to do it. If you just tell people that you are open for individual contract type work, the business will roll in eventually.
Just give it some time and start by doing it on a part-time basis. It might take several months before you land your first project, but once you completed some work for some clients, more business will come if you are good.
You will know when you are ready to take your individual contracts full-time.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#97I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists. The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where general…
I would go further and say that most companies would prefer to solve issues via specializing instead of generalizing. For example, if there is a quality problem most products would hire someone with QA experience or create a QA team instead of increasing general QA competence. It's just a more tangible solution, even if not always the best one.
It goes both ways, unfortunately - generalizing makes costs disappear, so to beancounters it looks like savings. Like e.g. having each employee responsible for correctly filling in their expenses into some SAP endpoint, under threat of several negative consequences if anything is wrong, should a random audit find out, lets the company reduce the financial side headcount. Less salaries to pay is legible savings. The overall drop of productivity as everyone else has to do extra job is not legible, so it isn't accounted for, and then people talk in surprise about cost diseases and productivity increases not keeping up with pace of advancement, etc.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, games abandoning skeuomorphism and UI animations is arguably even worse than regular UIs abandoning it. The game UI should feel part of the game (good examples: SimCity 4 and Sid Meier's Pirates) and not feel out of place. In-game advertisements are also off-putting unless they fit thematically and stylistically into the game. edit: your comment was much better when it was more verbose!<3
This argument makes sense, but I am not sure I agree with it. When I read a book in a modern typeface, it does not remove me from the story in the book. I do not need to read a world war II history book in Fraktur to get into it. Maybe, like typography, it has more to do with what one is used to?
A book is not a visual medium. A game is. In a book, you imagine the environment in your head, in the game, the graphics are already imagined (and drawn) for you. If the graphics already exist, a "modern" flat soulless UI overlay just makes for a painful disjointed from the in-game world experience.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any tips or resources on how to find individual consumers?
From my experience it seems that there is more work in this space than there is people to do it. If you just tell people that you are open for individual contract type work, the business will roll in eventually. Just give it some time and start by doing it on a part-time basis. It might take several months before you land your first project, but once you completed some work for some clients, more business will come i…
Should you put an ad somewhere, go to meetups or conferences and say you are open for contracts? Leave CV somewhere?
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the implementation of a poor algorithm is robust and bug-free, that would be something that is well-made, despite being bad. Consider a chair that is sturdy and load-bearing, while still being lightweight, but it wildly uncomfortable to sit on.
But they're describing a poor and buggy implementation.
The problems they are describing are bad design, not bad implementation.