Not sure about game development, but it sounds like a specialist programmer could become a dabbling audio engineer or narrative writer if given the opportunity, or vice versa. Might be a management problem: on a team of ten, you can grab the writer (singular) for coffee and spend a couple of days designing and writing dialogue for a side quest yourself, but on a team of hundreds it must be a lot harder.

And then, once you've spend that time using the tools, you can refactor the SpeechOptionNode to incorporate skill checks without attaching a script, or whatever other obscure tooling problems the writers are dealing with.

What do you think most indies are? I'd consider most indies much more generalist. You can't ever know a whole field but you can know pieces of it and once you learn one system it can be easier to know another. I think for example programmers often make very good designers as they will think though problems, handle attention to detail, and work to often find multiple solutions if need be... Wait that sounds like every field doesn't it ;) code, art, design, sound etc.

The main issue is mindset, a programmer might cut short a design to save himself time, an artist might simplify the gameplay to not put in as much effort, and a musician or writer might not focus as much on the visuals because they get caught up in how it should it sound/read etc. But they certainly can take on other roles. If you have any experience with start-ups and indies or freelancing you might find yourself take over roles you didn't expect originally. On smaller teams this goes a lot further.

It’s rare that Indie games are the same technical sophistication though.

Nothing wrong with them at all but the scale is just totally different, it’s like running a small bakery shop vs an industrial factory churning out bread for supermarkets

Yes, of course there is a trade-off. The specialists are likely much better at executing their particular functions. However, they still compete for the same market, sometimes surprisingly well. AAA games constantly feel like an art gallery where you are there to appreciate the beauty, while indie games have this soul and cohesion that is likely boosted by generalists as described in the article.

too bad most souls end up lying around on the street, begging others to turn back and avoid the terrible fate befallen on them. It's always rough selling your vision to others, and games are no different in terms entrepreneurship.

Overspecialized teams are also a hazard.

The best design solutions are usually compromises, but when the trade-off crosses into different disciplines (e.g., mechanical vs electrical), it can get tricky.

At minimum, you need people who can even recognize when such trades exist. It's better if you can find translators: the rare person with enough expertise in relevant domains to get to get two teams to work together efficiently.

In my own career, I've often found it useful to pick up cross-discipline skills, at least enough basics to fill one of the above roles.

"If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation...It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death.”

― Motoko Kusanagi ⎯ Ghost in the Shell (1995)

> At minimum, you need people who can even recognize when such trades exist. It's better if you can find translators: the rare person with enough expertise in relevant domains to get to get two teams to work together efficiently.

These are actually at least three (likely four or more) areas of expertise: expertise in two domains, expertise to communicate well with both sides, and the expertise to "translate" from each side to the colleagues of the other one.

For example, while I do claim to have expertise in multiple areas, it - I claim exactly because of this reason - often happened in the past that both sides told me that I somehow do not speak "their" language, but what they claim to be the one of the other side. Also, I have a tendency to find "weird" connections between both areas that both sides have difficulties understanding. :-(

Yes.

I'm a fella who has a smattering mix of - systems engineering, systems administration, network engineering and administration, database administration, software development, analog and digital communications systems design and administration (from the circuit level up), UI/UX design, process engineering, documentation, RF Engineering, project management, and a little bit of marketing.

The only thing I'm missing is the financial aspects of business, but from the technical, to the structural, to basically anything technology or people related - I know enough of it to step in and be competent in most situations.

To quote Heinlein "Specialization is for insects."

I love that Heinlein quote. To expand on it with a societal critique, it's not about working in a group; specialisation only works if you have an all-seeing all-powerful brain at the top that runs the entire show. A hive queen. Without a queen, the specialised insects die of starvation.

Some humans would find immense happiness trying to be the queen themselves. Others, to live like a cat. By themselves, with no one to tell them what to do. But our entire modern society is built upon and favours the busy, mindless drone. The education system shapes you like one, and isn't concerned to help you figure out your ideal place in the ecosystem.

Indeed, I've always marched to the beat of my own drummer.

In jobs that require a high level of expertise, you usually want to be both a specialist (to make you worth hiring) and a generalist (to be able to do what needs to be done). But it takes experience to get there. A lot of work in science and game development is done by relatively junior people, because both fields suffer from a high level of attrition. Those people can be specialists or generalists, but rarely both.

Look at Stardew Valley. One person (Eric Barone aka ConcernedApe) designed the game, wrote all the code (including the engine from scratch), designed all of the characters from concept sketches to final in-game art, wrote all the story and dialogue, created all of the sound effects, composed and recorded all the music with an original soundtrack of over one hundred pieces of music.

The game has since sold more than 20 million copies and some publications have called it the greatest game of all time. An indie game by one person!

Generalists absolutely can succeed today!

He did not write the engine from scratch, he is using MonoGame a framework that takes care of graphics, audio and input: https://www.monogame.net/showcase/

MonoGame is a rather shallow abstraction over DX9/10 era APIs, I don't think it's fair to say it "takes care" of much beyond wrapping some platform dependent code. The content pipeline in particular ranges from painful to unusable.

> Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist?

Stardew Valley guy did pretty much everything himself. Game design, programming, music, art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

Stardew Valley is certainly impressive for a one-man project and a success, but hot take, it's not that good in the grand scheme of things. "Jack of all trades, master of none". You can't overcome physics and the human lifetime.

Certainly, one can be a jack of all trades, and certainly, there's value in being so, but you're giving up mastery which has its own value, and comparatively, having multiple specialists collaborate is better than having multiple generalists.

Yes, but it's so hard and it's probably a bad idea unless you're in management. Specialisation of labour just means that as you scale, you need 1000 of exactly the right cog and you aren't interested in snowflakes.

I've pushed so hard at that, wandering all over the software universe and related areas. So often, it's really useful to know some ML, sql, java, .net, python, php, web, UX, cloud, on-prem, Kafka, mq, security, project management, ML, marketing etc because something pops up and I have a pretty good instinct. REALLY useful to de-BS tech areas for management. But right now I'm looking for a role at [Aussie tech company], I haven't really touched Java in a few years so I'm leetcoding, doing design interview courses and videos, brushing up on elastic and databricks and writing down some stories. A gap in any of those areas could set me back, and that's understandable - company needs a cog, you can be a useful snowflake once you've been a good cog for a while.

Possible, sure. Arguably required as an indie/small team. But if your aim is AA/AAA industry it's shooting yourself in the foot. Those industries seek deep specialists more than generalized knowledge. Maybe a director can benefit most, but you don't become a game director through that route. They promote that in-house.

On the indie side, a generalist indie needs less of what a big game needs. You probably don't need a graphics programmer at all for an indie game, for example.

Look into fields like cognitive science or places like MIT Media Lab - interdisciplinary research is the answer!

Valheim [1] is one of an ever-increasing number of amazing games made by extremely small teams. It was initially made by one guy in his spare time, who later picked up a former coworker to come join him after getting quite far along. That game is arguably the single most technically challenging type of game to make: seamless and dynamic (time/weather/seasons) open world, player crafting/construction in a pseudo-voxel type system, multiplayer, dynamic skill based combat, and more. Even though I'm sure they've probably grown a bit since then, the overwhelming majority of everything was done by primarily 1 guy. So yeah, it's very possible to be a generalist.

Going in the other direction, the increasingly absurd size of companies is one thing I really just can't wrap my head around at all. The final output just doesn't seem to justify these massive teams and budgets when contrasted against vastly smaller projects, like Valheim.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/

There is such a thing as too much specialization too, even in science. It can be helpful to get inspiration from knowledge of disparate fields. Things can come together with this cross-disciplinary approach. There's no one sized fits all answer to this.