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Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

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Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#101

Post by debok »

TotalCrackpot wrote: post #99
debok wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I didn't even do that. I just told people in my immediate vicinity that I am open to individual projects. One project came from my wife's ex-boss, one project came from a colleague who got a project via LinkedIn, but didn't want to take it himself.

You can just drop it in casual conversation. "What do you do for a living?" "Oh I'm a software developer at X-Corp, and I also do some work for individual clients" Something like that. People remember that stuff. If you like, you can even tell people you offer a finder's fee. Just don't be pushy. Be willing to build the business part-time until you have enough work to take it full-time.

You probably won't be getting big projects from the get go, but if you are humble, that won't be a problem. My first project was just optimizing and cleaning a slow and messy Python script. I charged $35 an hour an threw 10 hours into it.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#102

Post by mlyle »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #94
mlyle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is a scaling problem, and scaling problems in teams are limited by communications costs.

Adding more edges, where artists can talk to programmers more directly and meaningfully without it happening through a mediated hierarchy, improve throughput.

Of course, having the ability for subteams to work together more effectively doesn't mean you should always use it or abandon trying to manage the project through normal means.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#103

Post by BeetleB »

Aeolun wrote: post #80
BeetleB wrote: post #22

I just got done reading Sid Meier's Memoir! He also touts the importance of being a generalist. You can have programming as your primary expertise, but you should have a bare minimal competence in both audio and graphics. On a number of occasions, he'd have a vision for one aspect of his game that the whole team was against, and the way he would convince them would be to make a working prototype of that feature. The…

While this was nice, I also especially like the sections where he realizes he was wrong to keep insisting on doing stuff himself, like when they finally get a dedicated artist and sound designer.

The two are unrelated. In the latter, he was referring to a dedicated artist/sound designer for the final product. In my comment, he is referring to building a quick prototype to show to the team. Once he's done that, the dedicated folks will make the actual final/production version based on his prototype.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#104

Post by mejutoco »

Pannoniae wrote: post #98
mejutoco wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just for discussion's sake.

It is debatable what happens in our heads. When we play one of the earlier pixel Zeldas, one might argue our mind is filling in all the details with higher resolution images. I can still agree with this argument, though.

In terms of the UI, the game controller is also a soulless interface, and I guess one could claim it gets in the way of experiencing the game.

My opinion is simply that the UI being disjointed from the game world experience might make it more or less enjoyable, depending on experience.

As an example, I prefer a file > save checkpoint on a game, that gets out of the way, as opposed to one of those games where you have to go to a special place to save. In that case, for me, the immersion is ruined because I am constantly reminded that I cannot save the game state. Other players might think a File > save checkpoint menu is a flat soulless ui and they prefer the in-game integration.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#105

Post by Aloha »

sph wrote: post #77
Aloha wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I'm a fella who has a smattering mix of - systems engineering, systems administration, network engineering and administration, database administration, software development, analog and digital communications systems design and administration (from the circuit level up), UI/UX design, process engineering, documentation, RF Engineering, project management, and a little bit of marketing. The only thing I'm missing…

I love that Heinlein quote. To expand on it with a societal critique, it's not about working in a group; specialisation only works if you have an all-seeing all-powerful brain at the top that runs the entire show. A hive queen. Without a queen, the specialised insects die of starvation. Some humans would find immense happiness trying to be the queen themselves. Others, to live like a cat. By themselves, with no one t…

Indeed, I've always marched to the beat of my own drummer.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#106

Post by JohnFen »

robertlagrant wrote: post #68
ahoka wrote: post #65

Earlier 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.

But that shouldn't be an either-or thing. You need both a QA team and for the dev team to do appropriate testing.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#107

Post by Ferret7446 »

mlyle wrote: post #26
croes wrote: post #4

Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist? In science something similar happened. There was a time where some people knew pretty much in every science field, chemistry, physics, biology etc. but the amount of knowledge grew and it become impossible to know enough in every field. Maybe game development isn't any different. You either become an expert in on field or your knowledge is to superficial to actually he…

> Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist? Stardew Valley guy did pretty much everything himself. Game design, programming, music, art. 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.

Stardew Valley is certainly impressive for a one-man project and a success, but hot take, it's not that good in the grand scheme of things. "Jack of all trades, master of none". You can't overcome physics and the human lifetime.

Certainly, one can be a jack of all trades, and certainly, there's value in being so, but you're giving up mastery which has its own value, and comparatively, having multiple specialists collaborate is better than having multiple generalists.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#108

Post by brandensilva »

ycombinete wrote: post #59
brandensilva wrote: post #27

I tell you what, the Diablo 4 game is a perfect example of disjointedness that comes from pure specialists with little to no one who is a generalist that can bridge departments together in a way that makes for a better game and experience. And while they have made strides to implementing much of the community feedback for Season 2 many months later after much of the gamers have left, it isn't the same thing as having…

I feel like Chris Wilson's talk Designing Path of Exile to Be Played Forever is a great example of "a generalist leader with some authority, gaming experience, gaming systems and design, and passion": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjY

Oh totally and this is exactly what I mean.

I've listened to Chris and am a huge fan of his. The depth, experience, and love he puts into POE clearly demonstrates a generalist who gets it. Chris is a linchpin.

This is exactly the kind of people Blizzard lacks. They used to exist but they pushed out many of the generalists for the factory model of specialists and haven't really recovered since.

That doesn't mean they don't make decent games given the talent of the specialists in art and development, but the game design itself really requires a broader individual or group to bring it together.

Thanks for share.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#109

Post by brandensilva »

seventhtiger wrote: post #85
thfuran wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say that the game is well made of many of its core systems are defective?

Usually games with deep development issues have those issues show up everywhere. Not so in Diablo 4. The art direction is great, they produced a massive amount of assets at a very high quality, the story is great by Diablo standards, the marketing was good, the tech is pretty good. The player experience is still very good and very high quality. I usually find the only people who complain are the hardcore players. It…

You hit it quite well on what I was getting at.

I think many of us did enjoy Diablo 4 but the systems that make an ARPG shine fell through the cracks which is surprising given Blizzard defined the category.

I am very much am aware they aren't the same people running the show now from Blizzard North, and they had some major team shake ups in D4s dev cycle, so that was part of the problem but it's hard not to have high expectations.

It's just those pieces or connections in-between the excellent departmental work that fell apart, along with the foundation of an ARPG being flawed, that a gaming generalist could have solved to bring it all together.

I imagine things would look quite different now if that generalist person or persons on D4 played ARPGs for decades, had Diablo DNA infused in them with equal experience in game design and systems, and had some authority they could have made the best ARPG all over again since D2 given how good D4 is in so many ways. They equally learned a lot from D3 and it's shortcomings but that knowledge all felt lost in D4.

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