I recently ran into a well thought out and well explained article over at Reddit that was written by a former game developer. For those wishing to get involved in game development or for anyone who wanted an in-depth look into what it takes to development a game, how much time and money is invested as well as inception, then you’ll definitely want to take a read into this.
I thought that this was an excellent post and wanted to get it out to as many people as possible. Trust me, go check it out, it’s a very good read.
I’ve provided a short read of the post below:
“One feature change/addition can require several hundred hours or more of testing
Large AAA studios have QA teams that outnumber the dev team, usually by a large margin. Any time the code is changed you have 3 possible outcomes:
- The game is broken, everyone stop working and find out why
- The game MAY be broken, upwards of a hundred people need to be mobilized to retest absolutely everything in the game
- Just kidding, there’s only 2 options. Stop dreaming.
You may think additions to the pause screen would be a quick change with no consequences on the rest of the game…until it breaks the game. You may think the player customization should have no effect on the final boss battle…. until it breaks the game. You may think an artist can add content to a level with no adverse effects….until it breaks the game. Starting to get the idea? I’ve seen development come to a halt for the most trivial of changes that you would be shocked any game was ever finished.
Game studios are like group projects in college
Remember all those fond memories you have of getting assigned into groups in your English 101 class? Remember how awesome it is to do group projects? Game development is like that. It is EXACTLY like that. Imagine a group project where 5 people need to write sections of a creative writing assignment in a Word document together. That’s EXACTLY like game development assuming some of the members are not native-English speakers.”
Read the entire article at Reddit – here.
