4 ms·

Tools drive everything in games. Your normal AAA team structure is something along the lines of 1:10 dev:art/design. Every improvement you make in tools has a 1

Tools drive everything in games. Your normal AAA team structure is something along the lines of 1:10 dev:art/design. Every improvement you make in tools has a 10x factor in the people using it. Additionally everything about game development is about iteration. No one really knows what's fun(it's kinda one of those things where "I know what it is when I see it"). So the core of gamedev is iterating and trying as many crazy ideas as you can until something sticks. The right tools that enable that rapid iteration are critical. The faster you can make changes the more shots you get at capturing that lightning in the bottle(which is why 10% of games make 90% of the revenue).

danso 10y ago
I don't doubt that. I am particularly interested in how that mentality compares to the priorities of devs in other fields. For example, web development. I'm thinking that games development might be substantially more bespoke than webdev, necessitating the need to spend time on developing bespoke tooling?
- vvanders 10y ago
  There's really just 10-50x more "content" involved in gamedev then say web development. You might have 3-4 designers on a front end where a 60M budget game will have 6-8 animators alone, not even considering environment art, character art, level design, gameplay mechanic designers, etc. Now if you get into indie things are slightly different there but you still see just about everyone using an off-the-shelf engine because no one has the time to invest the man-years needed for proper tooling.
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    "proper tooling" is an interseting choice of words. Are you saying that the off-the-shelf engines are somehow inadiquate, a necessary evil compared to hand rolled tools?
    - vvanders 10y ago
      Not really, just each game usually has unique needs and it's hard to build tools that address every possible game style and type. Usually when you use UE3/UE4/Unity you end up making significant modifications/extensions to meet those needs.
merb 10y ago
> Tools drive everything in games. Isn't that true for everything in development?
- vvanders 10y ago
  Sure, it's turtles all the way down in some aspects. However you usually don't have your front-end web designer working a custom toolset to author images for webpages. There's no common standard in games(hell even 3D interchange formats are a mess) so there's quite a bit of custom tooling done per-title based on gameplay needs in addition to the standard content pipeline(export->import->annotate/tune->bake->console) that you see.

danso 10y ago

I don't doubt that. I am particularly interested in how that mentality compares to the priorities of devs in other fields. For example, web development. I'm thinking that games development might be substantially more bespoke than webdev, necessitating the need to spend time on developing bespoke tooling?

vvanders 10y ago
There's really just 10-50x more "content" involved in gamedev then say web development. You might have 3-4 designers on a front end where a 60M budget game will have 6-8 animators alone, not even considering environment art, character art, level design, gameplay mechanic designers, etc. Now if you get into indie things are slightly different there but you still see just about everyone using an off-the-shelf engine because no one has the time to invest the man-years needed for proper tooling.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  "proper tooling" is an interseting choice of words. Are you saying that the off-the-shelf engines are somehow inadiquate, a necessary evil compared to hand rolled tools?
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Not really, just each game usually has unique needs and it's hard to build tools that address every possible game style and type. Usually when you use UE3/UE4/Unity you end up making significant modifications/extensions to meet those needs.

merb 10y ago

> Tools drive everything in games. Isn't that true for everything in development?

vvanders 10y ago
Sure, it's turtles all the way down in some aspects. However you usually don't have your front-end web designer working a custom toolset to author images for webpages. There's no common standard in games(hell even 3D interchange formats are a mess) so there's quite a bit of custom tooling done per-title based on gameplay needs in addition to the standard content pipeline(export->import->annotate/tune->bake->console) that you see.