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> Programmers don't make games fun; it's the game designers that make it fun. Not really. About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Soli

> Programmers don't make games fun; it's the game designers that make it fun. Not really. About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Solid tech chops, but also with an eye towards gameplay you can bet they tweaked the shit out of our game system. We only had 3 'dedicated' designers so a non-trivial amount of work fell in the dev's hands. To get concrete the smoothing/sticky algorithm and tuning of our aiming mechanism was created and owned by a single dev. Take a look at this[1] for a good breakdown of what goes into something like that. [1] http://drstrangevolt.blogspot.com/2012/12/aim-acceleration-in-console-shooters-part2.html http://drstrangevolt.blogspot.com/2012/12/aim-acceleration-i...

rifung 8y ago
> About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Solid tech chops, but also with an eye towards gameplay you can bet they tweaked the shit out of our game system. We only had 3 'dedicated' designers so a non-trivial amount of work fell in the dev's hands. I don't feel like you're disagreeing with me. It just sounds like the roles on your team were more blurred but the point still stands. What's meaningful isn't your title but the type of work you do. The more influence you have over the design of the game, the bigger an impact you will have on how fun it is.
- vvanders 8y ago
  No, I'm very much disagreeing with you. I can take any title I worked on and point to art, code, production or design work that dovetailed into what makes a game "fun". In fact the want to know what the largest predictor of if a game is going to be fun or not? Talk to any game designer and they'll tell you it's the iteration cycle time of their tools. They'll be the first to admit that they don't know what fun is(otherwise we'd just formulate it, bottle it up and fire all the game designers). The more they can throw things at the wall that "stick" the better chance a game has at being fun. I also can't think of any team I've been on my career(or other teams I know of) where roles weren't "blurred" it's expected and required in the industry even on large, AAA teams.

rifung 8y ago

> About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Solid tech chops, but also with an eye towards gameplay you can bet they tweaked the shit out of our game system. We only had 3 'dedicated' designers so a non-trivial amount of work fell in the dev's hands. I don't feel like you're disagreeing with me. It just sounds like the roles on your team were more blurred but the point still stands. What's meaningful isn't your title but the type of work you do. The more influence you have over the design of the game, the bigger an impact you will have on how fun it is.

vvanders 8y ago
No, I'm very much disagreeing with you. I can take any title I worked on and point to art, code, production or design work that dovetailed into what makes a game "fun". In fact the want to know what the largest predictor of if a game is going to be fun or not? Talk to any game designer and they'll tell you it's the iteration cycle time of their tools. They'll be the first to admit that they don't know what fun is(otherwise we'd just formulate it, bottle it up and fire all the game designers). The more they can throw things at the wall that "stick" the better chance a game has at being fun. I also can't think of any team I've been on my career(or other teams I know of) where roles weren't "blurred" it's expected and required in the industry even on large, AAA teams.