I'm a software developer and can do pretty much nothing without an artist
Give https://opengameart.org a quick browse if you need some quick art.
All I get from this is that the comic artist is definately a gamedev
I say "developer" is only for code, "designer" can be any system, level, or character designer (ooh they use spreadsheets!), "artist" is only for drawing things. Marketing douchebags are "marketing douchebags". And since I'm indie, I'm all of those.
But some studios just don't care and have stupid titles; as long as thy get paid it doesn't matter to them. WTF cares what some idiot screaming in a forum says?
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Idk man.. seems like that would make GameDev mean anything and nothing. Just for the record, I have no stakes in this discussion, I really don't care. I just find it weird to blur a word like that. Is the game company's canteen cook also a game dev? The person who plugged in the monitors? The CEO? The HR person? And so on..
I agree tho that this entire discussion feels a little like gatekeeping and would prefer everyone getting some credit for the game development over pedantic hairsplitting.
Ooh, a whole decade! I've been developing games ("developing") since the '80s. You are literally the guy I referred to, in a studio, with a stupid title. If you'd called yourself a developer without being able to write code at some companies I've worked at, you'd have a conversation with HR. As it is, people can get away with it but it's not true. Words have meanings, even when savages from a fallen age misuse them.
Actual customer service/community managers are fine, we need those; working indie that's the worst part, not having them. But I'm with Bill Hicks on marketing douchebags.
A common complaint I see on gaming forums (especially after a new patch) is "Why is team working on X instead of Y?!" as though the people working on Y could switch to X or should be fired or sit around and do nothing until X is fixed. The people doing content creation stuff (e.g. artists, writers, scripting team, voice actors etc) are probably not going to be able to fix the netcode of the game.
(obviously, there is also mismanagement and failing to read your audience, but god damn gamers are the most entitled audience I've encountered in doing any art)(as a gamer etc etc)
I see it too, I tried explaining how it works a few times but the complainers don't give a shit, they want X and they want it yesterday! Even if X is a vague concept that we don't know yet. Frustrating.
It's one reason I prefer a community forum over a community Discord. The forum tends to keep the complaints to a few easy to ignore threads. Meanwhile in the Discord someone asks the same braindead question every 5 minutes.
All true points. There's also a point to be made about allocation of resources. Should you be spending millions marketing a broken game?
Short version: sometimes, yeah. CP2077 wouldn't have been able to pay their teams that worked on the game well beyond release date without a good initial turnout for buying the game. You can chalk that up to CDPR having good recognition from the witchers if you want, but it's pretty obvious they shelled out huge to put the game on the map initially. DLC alone could not have saved the game imo.
Is this a real controversy?? Why
Because gatekeeping.
I didn't know job titles were gatekeeping. Do you think that a fry cook at your restaurant is also a gamedev because they happen to feed the person making the games? It has nothing to do with gatekeeping, it has to do with "words have meanings". You don't just get to decide you're a gamedev because you want to be, that doesn't make sense.
community managers are marketing not dev. some of them are devs who should demand extra pay for the extra work they're doing out of scope but the guy i know who is a CM and the guy i know who is a dev that gets saddled with the CM work because the company is small talk about that job very differently.
What a bunch of elitist horseshit.
As a senior engine developer at a games company, this is how I see it:
- Your shitty flappy bird clone is worth less than the cheeto stain on your t-shirt as a cultural artifact
- I have met countless programmers who have never finished a single game, because they can't design for shit
- I have met countless artists and level designers who have made commercially successful games after learning how to use 10% of a single scripting language
- The word "developer" predates software engineering and has nothing to with tech. We changed the meaning and now 14 year olds on reddit have changed it back. It doesn't matter.
- If you were really some hot shit solo developer you would not need to look for validation in your job title. Seeing thousands of people enjoy something you designed every day would be enough.
I get it! Me, developing a game, but it's just not interactive in any way
I mean sure anybody in a team can have input in what makes a 'game' in a basic sense. But I think there's a difference between I contribute to this process and I do the thing. If programming is muscle/nerves, level design is bones (especially with puzzles) and concept art is skin (or spine when it pertains to the story).
Also IMO solo-game-dev stuff should be elevated even for the simple stuff. It means you got all the keys, even if it takes you a while to find the right ones. (note I'm not even really comfortable with programming so I wouldn't call it a bias, though if I could I most likely would stay solo so maybe it is)
At some point, it become fashionable for programmers to be called "developers" and then everyone wanted the cool title, so it applies to anyone even remotely involved now. There's never a way to turn back the clock and make words more precise again after people have blown them up, so there's not a lot of point in trying to change public sentiment. I've seen this happen to a lot of technical words over the last 30+ years, and I've basically decided that there's no point in trying to fight it. It's not worth the cost, especially since I'm unlikely to win.
I should say that I could see someone who does a decent amount of in-engine work (nodes and their attributes, scenes, importing, handling some technical setup, basic layout/UI stuff, testing, particles/shaders etc) being called a developer/designer even if they aren't a programmer. Though I also think someone like that probably can at least do some very simple code, at least pasting enough together to get something like movement/projectiles/signals etc.
Again, said as someone who is closer to an artist (and hasn't made a game) who has tinkered with some stuff like that.
Yeah but “words evolve” and “language changes!” You can’t just go around asking whether they’re good changes!
Your analogy is a little weird.
I'd say that game dev is the organism and the rest is the clothing, or the shelter, or the food...
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By that same logic, nobody can be a software developer because in order to develop a software project involving 100 people, one needs HR, managers, QA/testing, SREs, sysadmins, architects, finance, ...
Nobody can be a brick layer either because in order to build the Burj Khalifa one needed architects, engineers, glaziers, plumbers, managers, secretaries, fork-lift drivers, truck drivers, etc.
Every team project has is multi-disciplinary. To claim one discipline doesn't exist because in order to complete the project all disciplines are necessary, is willingful misrepresentation of facts.
