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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26538 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Why should devs be the one in charge? It's the designers, the ones that design the systems, that make the games what they are.

Is design really that exclusive of a skill? I find it hard to believe.

I'd put artists above designers in terms of value, and programmers above all of them.

I can come up with the coolest game you've ever played, in my head, right now. Good luck making it without artists and programmers.

This seems exactly backwards. Solo indie devs with shitty art assets and buggy code are over night millionaires if they actually have a cool game idea, on the flip side, AAA games with polished performance and graphics flop left and right because the fundamental game play is shit.

Maybe I've been out of the gaming world too long - where are these fantastic games with no/crappy art?

Even very designer-driven games (EX Super Meat Boy) have great visual components.

Vampire survivors and co? Juice Galaxy was my first thought, but that barrel of lunacy is free already.

EX Super Meat Boy

If super meat boy has great visual components then basically anyone who can download a free asset pack from itch.io has great visual components.

Yeah, good luck making a movie without actors, camerapeople, costume designers and so on, but it's still the director who is the lynchpin of the whole production.

I am one of the people who would agree with you that leadership in any team context is key, and it's a lesson that took me too long to learn.

I see the value in a designer/team who has a vision and can push to see it through. The analogy of a director may be a good comparison, in that they can produce what I would consider a good movie with very little in terms of assets or contributions from the team.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "Value" and "Success". An indie film with one director is almost always going to be crap, occasionally a niche art-house classic, and very, very rarely a breakout like Blair Witch or something.

It's not management specifically I was talking about, it's having a detailed vision that you know how to iterate upon all the way to the successful release. You can be the sole developer/artist/writer/composer working on the game, but game design is the only critical skill you can't really subcontract. Theoretically it's just a PDCA cycle, but in practice it's a complex learned skill:

  • can you tell why your vision is a game people will play?
  • can you tell which features are quicksand and have to be dropped or replaced before you've wasted too much effort on them?
  • can you tell why build A is better than build B and what the next build C should be like to be even better?
  • can you tell when your game has started to diverge from your vision and rein it in or pivot to a new vision?
  • etc.

Indie devs have to learn this because they are often wearing multiple hats. It's very useful for designers to know the limits of engines/art/music/writing they have to work with. It's very useful for a developer to have some design skills ("Dave, the game is based around massive leaps across massive maps, our current movement code feels sluggish, I think we need more air control," says Steve the designer, and Dave can either increase air control and send the new build to Steve or keep tweaking the code until the movement feels just right). But it general that's two separate skillsets and one of them is critical.

No, you cannot. You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played. At best you can do an elevator pitch for the latter, and noone will give a shit because being an ideas guy is indeed not an exclusive skill.

Actual game design starts at the hundreds of pages of plans and spreadsheets and design documents required to turn those ideas into something concrete. The detail level of which keeps growing the more people with less direct personal communication you need to convey those ideas to.

Tons of great games have been made without artists. Many, many more only spend any time and effort on artists long after the designers are satisfied their prototypes are worth the expense. Tons of great games have been made without programmers. The entire fields of designer board games and tabletop rpgs are like 30-60 years old despite requiring no technology not available centuries ago, only advances in game design.

You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played.

First I'd disagree with this - stealing systems that I've played and modifying them is exactly what I'd do. Could I have come up with MtG on my own 30 years ago? Probably not, but a background in software and being a huge fan of games means I could probably come up with something serviceable, if not 100% unique.

Tons of great games have been made without artists.

I can think of vanishingly few games where the art and design were not significant. My video game dev friends often have something great on their hands, design and system-wise, that is ultimately not fun to play with stock art. Simple platformers with great art and music (Braid, Limbo) are vastly more successful than their hideous, bare-bones brethren. Sure, games are developed before artists get involved, but they don't make it to production or succeed without it.

I believe the contention is that the devs should also be designers, or rather, that the designers should rise up from the dev mines.

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