Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
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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
#2I thought this was the point of project managers, they're supposed to harmonise various types of specialist when no one generalist can do everything.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#3I thought this was the point of project managers, they're supposed to harmonise various types of specialist when no one generalist can do everything.
I think this is true, but even still, having pure communication-overhead roles will probably never outperform a team of generalist ICs. (edit: just my opinion - I have no data for this)
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#4Is 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 help.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#5I thought this was the point of project managers, they're supposed to harmonise various types of specialist when no one generalist can do everything.
That never works in practice. Specialists want to do the thing they specialize in. What happens when you have a bug that bridges across multiple areas of the code? Nobody wants to deal with those bugs because it would mean leaving their area of expertise. This also applies to anything that applies to the game as a whole, like optimization or look and feel.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#6Is 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…
Not sure about game development, but it sounds like a specialist programmer could become a dabbling audio engineer or narrative writer if given the opportunity, or vice versa. Might be a management problem: on a team of ten, you can grab the writer (singular) for coffee and spend a couple of days designing and writing dialogue for a side quest yourself, but on a team of hundreds it must be a lot harder.
And then, once you've spend that time using the tools, you can refactor the SpeechOptionNode to incorporate skill checks without attaching a script, or whatever other obscure tooling problems the writers are dealing with.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#7This also explains the declining gameplay and immersion of many (most?) games. The art and the gameplay are simply not synced to each other, so they feel separate and disjoint. For example, the environment having similarly looking but differently behaving objects like rocks.
Or how instead of designing emergent systems, most games just slap modifiers on everything and "balance" that way. +20% bow reload speed and +25% speed, anyone?
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#8I thought this was the point of project managers, they're supposed to harmonise various types of specialist when no one generalist can do everything.
That’s the point of integration. They’re generalists who are like technical project managers and bridge the gap between teams.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#9I thought this was the point of project managers, they're supposed to harmonise various types of specialist when no one generalist can do everything.
A good PM will go a long way to mitigating the problems with lack of generalists, but they can only go so far.
The heart of the problem is that at some point, you need to make decisions and solve problems where disciplines interact. In the end, you cannot really make an informed decision, or reliability solve problems in these situations without some party actually being able to grasp the cross-disciplinary picture.
In the absence of actual generalists, you usually end up with ad-hoc education - crash courses where each discipline tries to educate the other (and the PM), so that they can try to get something hammered out. And this can actually be quite successful - this happens all the time, and works out very often. In fact, this is probably where many generalists (or dual-hatters) organically arise - you get a crash course in some other area while trying to figure out a problem, and then the next time you get tapped because you already have some knowledge, and you find it kinda interesting and the next thing you know, you're a generalist of sorts.
I think it's quite true that in large projects you can't possibly have a generalist who actually knows -everything-. But it's also quite possible to have a good bench of dual-hatters (or dunno... 3-4 hatters), who can go a long way to relieving issues.
Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality
#10This also explains the declining gameplay and immersion of many (most?) games. The art and the gameplay are simply not synced to each other, so they feel separate and disjoint. For example, the environment having similarly looking but differently behaving objects like rocks. Or how instead of designing emergent systems, most games just slap modifiers on everything and "balance" that way. +20% bow reload speed and +25…
I think this harmoniousness operates in more subtle ways, too. I'm playing through the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, and it's a lot of fun, but there's something that doesn't quite click... like the UI is a behavorial engagement layer over the game, and not part of the game itself. Like you can never be completely in the world because something outside is holding your hand all the way.
The 16- through 64- bit Zeldas, for their clunkiness, were compellingly immersive. I don't think it's just nostalgia; I've played indie games where the UI is part of a whole that sucks you in. This is true even if the UI has a modern feel, like Hollow Knight, which felt overpolished in its presentation and interface, to me at least, in a way that was off-kilter -- yet something about it sucks you in instead of pulling you out, being part of the world's presentation and in an aesthetically transitive sense part of the world itself. There's something about these modern AAA games where you feel like you're not playing a game but rather a Skinner box containing a game. It's just not the same. I can't exactly put my finger on it.