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I'm not sure it's a good example... Stardew Valley as a technical feat is pretty average, there's nothing fancy. In fact the game could have been made 20 years

I'm not sure it's a good example... Stardew Valley as a technical feat is pretty average, there's nothing fancy. In fact the game could have been made 20 years ago with this looks. Comparing it to AAA is really far from the truth, because modern 3D game dev is much much much more complicated.

trinsic2 3y ago
Yeah but is the game industry really better off having such complicated games? Some might say no. I'm finding that I have more fun and feel better about supporting indie games. Less shit I have to deal with from companies that don't have the same level of connection with their games.
mlyle 3y ago
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 liasions.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >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 requiring distributed scale. You'll either take prohibitively long, and/or produce the wrong/redundant results as solutions clash into each other with no syncronization. I think instead of trying to fit more generalists into a AAA pipeline, we should encourage more generalists to optimize for a small team and deliver leaner projects that can still turn heads.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    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.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
I seriously respect his "average, nothing fancy" achievements. I'd feel really proud if I could do just a fraction of what these people do. Haven't managed to learn audio production tools yet. I suck at drawing so much I can barely draw stick figures. Hell I can barely write legible text with a pen, I'd be screwed without computers and printers. Yet there are people out there who are not only better programmers than me but also artists and musicians. Truly worthy of respect.
pjc50 3y ago
The difficult bit, which sometimes AAA devs with large funded teams don't manage, is _shipping_ the game, and then getting people to buy it.

trinsic2 3y ago

Yeah but is the game industry really better off having such complicated games? Some might say no. I'm finding that I have more fun and feel better about supporting indie games. Less shit I have to deal with from companies that don't have the same level of connection with their games.

mlyle 3y ago

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 liasions.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>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 requiring distributed scale. You'll either take prohibitively long, and/or produce the wrong/redundant results as solutions clash into each other with no syncronization. I think instead of trying to fit more generalists into a AAA pipeline, we should encourage more generalists to optimize for a small team and deliver leaner projects that can still turn heads.
- mlyle 3y ago
  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.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

I seriously respect his "average, nothing fancy" achievements. I'd feel really proud if I could do just a fraction of what these people do. Haven't managed to learn audio production tools yet. I suck at drawing so much I can barely draw stick figures. Hell I can barely write legible text with a pen, I'd be screwed without computers and printers. Yet there are people out there who are not only better programmers than me but also artists and musicians. Truly worthy of respect.

pjc50 3y ago

The difficult bit, which sometimes AAA devs with large funded teams don't manage, is _shipping_ the game, and then getting people to buy it.