Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

Re:Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and ... by johnnyanmac on Monday October 16, 2023 @06:53AM (#37898004)

>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.

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Re:Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and ... by mlyle on Monday October 16, 2023 @10:09AM (#37900114)

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.

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