Battle of the Engines: Recruiting The Talent

[kabab]

[Psmith]

Ryanzec:

I don't deny it, entirely.

The game tool industry is seeing something potentially powerful in releasing their incredibly expensive tools for free. (expensive in terms of development resources). I think what they see is to be found in growing a garden of potential. Potential skills, potential authors, potential producers of content.

In the past, they had some corn, they had some ground and they had some time. They sowed the seed not knowing exactly what would come of it. They did manage to grow some corn - it's just that now, they are getting a clearer picture of how to raise the best corn, the most corn in the most productive way with the least expense.

Pardon the metaphor. The way they can harvest the most in terms of profit is by cultivating a new and more fruitful "seed" in the form of fresh talent. And there are a lot of willing "seedlings" eager to be planted in their most fertile soil.

New and friendlier tools represent the fertilizer that these young plants need. It's what it will take to reap the most bountiful harvest, (note the Thanksgiving theme, here).

And, to protect their investment, these professional "growers" simply must allow some of their precious soil to lay "fallow", at least, for a time.

Psmith

[Psmith]

Alric:

Cookie cutter sorts of nodes will constrain creativity to some degree, but to what degree? Given a sufficient number and variety of cookie cutter nodes, extremely diverse kinds of combinations become possible.

Some constraint is a good thing or we end up wasting time, recreating what someone else has done that is only slightly different from that which we might wish to achieve.

The fact that you can name the stereotypical genres of game types and count them on a couple of hands proves that new exploration by those unfamiliar with these game genres is something gravely needed. New users might even use some of these cookie cutter nodes in ways we never imagined ourselves.

Imagine "games" without scores or any form of competition - what a novel thought.

Psmith

[Alric]

[Psmith]

Alric:

Because Unity is free and Virtools is very expensive. At least, I think so. I can't even find a published price, anywhere.

Psmith

[MadMax]

The idea that

1: That everyone will freely release their code for all to use.

2: That the said nodes will be bug free is ludicrous

Who will maintain the nodes ? Unmaintained API code is useless.

plus the code will likely blow
http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=73

[Psmith]

MadMax:

It's a cottage industry waiting to happen. Nobody, especially me, has suggested that independent coders release anything for free. If you sell it, you maintain it. Pretty simple.

Now, if a company like Unity wanted to look at producing and maintaining a series of nodes as part of their "seeding" exercise, who's going to stop them?

Psmith

[Alric]

Well, I think it's viable, and I don't deny that talented people could produce good work with such a system.

I just don't think it's the same thing as or in direct competition with current game engines or programmers.

[ryanzec]

I for one will welcome a node based visual programming tool but people should not rely solely on it.

[Joseph Ferano]

One of the first things I want to comment on is how incredibly smart the general posting population of Unity seems to be. I don't think I have ever frequented a forum where I've read so many well-thought-out posts that offer constructive and logical criticism. Usually I read things like "ur a moran", so this is certainly a great thing to see. I guess it has to do with the type of activity being discussed. Game development/design is definitely not for the faint of heart.

@Psmith

One of the issues I take with your stance is how you see this from your perspective and slightly patronize the programming community. At times you try and fix your previous comments, but you still convey this message that we programmers are burdening you into having to code to be able to get a game up.

I may not be an all-star programmer, but I have enough experience where I feel totally comfortable using a keyboard instead of a mouse.

I was also an artist before I got into programming. I was a Flash user since the days of Flash 3, so you can imagine its been a while. I was always a little reluctant to get into programming and when I did, it was one tough nut to crack. It took me quite a while to get anywhere but when I did, I found programming to be a fabulous world. So much so, that the artist in me dissipated and eventually the tables have turned and I was actually reluctant to get back into art, namely 3D art.

When I hear you talk about getting rid of programmers, it deeply troubles me how one-sided this train of thought is. At times you claim that to each his own but your overall message is not that. You want tools that will make your life easier. Well, so do I. I wish I didnt have to make a single model or scene for my games since I just want the joy of creating intricately well designed code so I can get my specific game concepts achieved. Game concepts, just so you know, which are completely unique to anything I have seen as of yet. I find it very hard to believe that any one visual programming solution would be able to offer me the unique game functionality I desire.

You think about your situation only. So lets switch things up. You artists are making it hard for programmers to get generated game art because you keep doing things your way and don't allow "progression". You selfish bunch, you!

Whether you are in the minority or the majority, it still doesn't mean you should exclude programmers from these same arguments. Someone already mentioned that UDK offers both methods of programming. UnrealScript and the Kismet. So what's wrong with that? Why can't we have the best of both worlds? Why do we have to have a visual programming environment to make programmers obsolete and not make game art generation to make artists obsolete? Why do programmers hold back the visual programming environment and artist don't hold back the generated game art potential?

The answer is "to each his own." As long as people like to code, there will always exist a need in the market companies like Unity will be happy to fulfill. Unity3D is still an artist oriented tool, but they will not cater to just one group, because that would be stupid, they would lose market share. To answer the question in your first post, the game engine that caters to the largest amount of people while still being good at everything it does, will be the winner. The one who excludes either programmers or artists will not do too well. UDK has a way of beating Unity if it continues to develop the kismet in a way that no programming will be required. However, how many programmers do you think are going to be turned off by that? I personally LOVE the fact that I can make my own custom GUI controls or plug-ins. Something that UDK just doesn't offer, which is one of the many turn-offs that eventually made me quickly forget about the new free tech and stick to Unity.

[kabab]

[Booger]

Nice thread, though I've only been skimming parts of it.

I started off in the 'programmer' end of the scale when I took advanced placement C++ course in high school. Back then I didn't even know how to draw. A decade later, as a result of my employment and hobbies, I learned to become decent in 2D art. Only just recently I think I can finally say I have gotten the ins and outs of Blender. But in the meantime I just did less and less of code. Maybe because I've gotten older and prefer to specialize rather than balance my learning (something best for young and inquisitive minds). At this point in time I don't even want to look at lines of code more than a paragraph long.

I have game design ideas I don't think I'll be able to implement them by myself. It was easier to hack together some code for 2D games (mainly by copying and pasting script snippets from others), but code for 3D is another beast entirely, because of the added math of positioning in 3D space.

Maybe I'll just create a complete game design document and make all the custom assets myself, then recruit a dedicated programmer in these forums for either up-front pay or profit-sharing, with the understanding that either of us will be free to adapt code or art asset gained from our joint project to any of our subsequent projects as long as we tweak them enough so they don't look exactly the same.

I think MakeHuman is a great thing and await its added flexibility, because modelling a human body is still a chore -- and any human body pretty much resembles any others until you give it distinctive features. I also think drag n drop visual IDEs are awesomely intuitive. In short, let's not make this into programmer vs artist. I thought that one-man games are great simply because they are the work of one creator. But they can often be flawed because of one-track logic and not being able to look at the project in another perspective. I've worked on several small projects, and to this day my most enjoyable project -- and the one with the best end result -- was one in which I was part of a 2-person team. Both of us were designers of the game, but my project partner skewed towards the mechanics and coding, and I towards graphics, and music, and overall flow.

[MadMax]

[roberdan]

[quote="Alric"]

[ui20]

I read the first 2 pages of comments and sadly I have no time reading the 3 remaining ones so here goes.

Aren't the majority forgetting to include game designers and interaction designers in the debate?
Arguably those are the real game makers out there and I think that Unity should be tailored for them as well and not exclusively for programmers or artists.

In my opinion most programmers and artists make for poor game makers. Sure they can both contribute to the production part of a game but there is a reason 99% of the app store is littered with crapps, because everyone and their mommas who can code a few lines of C decide to make games for the Iphone.

Gamdesign is not exclusively about making pretty games (artists) or coding 1000s of lines of code (programmers), it is about making great and fun interactive experiences. Unity gives designers a fighting chance to at least create prototypes of their ideas and concepts and provides a visual platform for testing and working on games.