The Importance of Vision, 1 of 3

As a small break while I finish my vacation, I’m going to publish my recent post at AltDevBlogADay in three parts.  View it there in its entirety.

Every ambitious creative endeavor has at its helm a single individual who is responsible for providing the vision for its development. In games, we have Art Directors in charge of the aesthetic, Technical Directors in charge of the technology decisions, and Creative Directors in charge of the overall game. Their chief responsibility is to guide the creation of a project that achieves their vision. The most successful directors are able to articulate a clear vision to the team, get buy in from its merits and his success, and motivate the team to execute with excellence. A project without a director’s vision is uninspired and unsuccessful.

It is no surprise, then, that even though we talk about tools and pipeline as its own niche- and even acknowledging it as its own niche is a big step- we have such uninspired and unsuccessful tools and pipeline at so many places in the industry. We seem to have a mild deficiency of vision in our small community of tools programmers and tech artists, and an absolute famine of vision and representation at the director level.

This situation is unfortunate and understandable, but underlies all tools problems at any studio. Fixing it is the vital component in fixing the broken tools cultures many people report. Without anyone articulating a vision, without anyone to be a seed and bastion of culture and ideas, we are doomed to not just repeat the tools mistakes of yesterday, but to be hopelessly blind towards their causes and solutions.

Where does this lack of vision come from? What can we do to resolve it?

The lack of vision stems from the team structures most studios have. Who is responsible for tools as a whole, tools as a concept, at your studio? Usually, no one and everyone. We have Tech Art Directors that have clever teams that often lack the programming skills or relationships to build large tool, studio-wide toolsets. We have Lead Tools Programmers that are too far removed from, or have never experienced, actual content development. We have Lead Artists that design tools and processes for their team, that do not take into account other teams or pipelines and are uninspired technically.

There is no one who understands how every content creator works, who also has the technical understanding and abilities to design sophisticated technologies and ideas. No one who understands how content and data flow from concept art and pen and paper into our art and design tools, into the game and onto the release disk.

Without this person, what sort of tools and pipelines would you expect? If there were no Art Director or someone who had final say and responsibility for a cohesive art style across the entire game, how different would characters and environment look in a single game? If there were no Creative Director who had final say over design, how many incohesive features would our games have? If there were no Technical Director to organize the programming team, how many ways would our programming teams come up with so solve the same problems?

So how come with Tools and Pipeline we don’t think the same way? There is no Tools Director, so we end up with disparate tools and workflows that fail to leverage each other or provide a cohesive experience. The norm for the tools situation is to look like the type of situation we find in studios with weak leadership at the Director level. A mess.  We need a person who understands how everyone at the studio works, and to take ownership of it and provide a vision for improving it.