The Importance of Vision, 2 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.

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.

No longer can this vital role be left to a hodepodge of other people. Your Art/Technical/Creative Directors, your Lead Programmers/Artists/Designers, can no longer be the people expected to provide the vision for studio’s Tools and Pipeline.

The person who fills this role needs to be someone with enough experience creating art that they can embed with Artists. Someone who can program well enough to have the title of Programmer. Someone flexible enough that they can deal with the needs of Designers. Someone charismatic enough that they can fight and win the battle against the inevitable skepticism, fear, and opposition a change like this would bring.

These people are few and far between, and every one of them I know is happily employed. We’re asking for a unique set of passions and skills, a set that isn’t common in the games industry especially (who gets into games to write tools?!). We need to start training our tools developers (tech artists, tools programmers) to aspire to have these passions and skills.

This won’t happen magically. Unless our studios can promise that these aspirations will be fulfilled, few people will bother, and I cannot blame them. Many studios have made the commitment to having killer tools. Almost as many have failed. And almost as many as that have failed to realize lack of a cohesive vision as a primary factor.

It isn’t surprising that resources get moved from tools dev, that schedules cannot be stuck to, that they cannot attract senior developers. Without a cohesive tools vision, how are resources supposed to be properly allocated? Resources become a fragile compromise between competing departments, rather than brokered by a separate party without allegiances. How is a schedule supposed to be followed, when the people doing the work are not the ones who feel the repercussions? And it is no surprise that it is difficult to attract senior talent with strong programming skills necessary to develop great tools to these positions. If there is no career path- and, let’s face it, most studios have no career path for tools developers- they’re going to go into game programming, or the general software industry (which is, for the most part, some form of tools development in a different environment).