3 ms·
Much like humans and apes, my experience as a games-adjacent engineering leader is that game dev and non-game dev practices diverged somewhere in the early 90s,
by madrox 6y ago
Much like humans and apes, my experience as a games-adjacent engineering leader is that game dev and non-game dev practices diverged somewhere in the early 90s, and are now two completely different animals. The ideas that feel so elementary to non-game devs are foreign to game devs, such as having a good git flow, continuous integration, and so on. This is, in part, why the games industry was caught off guard by the mobile revolution. Game devs weren't paying attention to what was happening in the non-game dev space.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 6y agoAs someone whose entire career was spent doing dev and dev management in the SaaS app world, but who's tempted to experience what it's like to work in a game studio, it seems like the jump is pretty hard to make. Not only is it a different type of software writing, but the processes and the expectations seem pretty different as well. Seems like the two worlds are not that simple to switch between, which you're saying as well.
- atom_arranger 6y agoAs a (primarily) web developer I think a huge difference is that games are immediate mode rendered as opposed to retained. I think a lot of complexity that web devs deal with is due to it not being immediate mode.
- taneq 6y ago> Game devs weren't paying attention to what was happening in the non-game dev space. Well of course not, they were too busy crunching 70-hour weeks trying to hit that arbitrary release date so they could be fired and spend months unemployed before the next game studio ramped up for release. /s-only-not-really