People don't play a game because it's got 100% code coverage and the greatest end to end tests. Most of the time people play a game because it's fun. Programmers don't make games fun; it's the game designers that make it fun.
Sure the game would not exist without programmers, but you can take one set of programmers and replace it with another set and largely the game will be the same to the players, assuming the skills/experience of the programmers are similar.
In a way, programmers are necessary, but the most they can do is stop the game from completely falling apart. It's the game designers that have a much greater potential to make a game great.
It's easy to forget what absolutely touched lives we developers have, even the grunts.
Anyhow, it is incumbent on every technical worker to find and establish their niche over time. If you get called a "unicorn" in whatever field you land in, you're in a good negotiating position for things like salary.
I love this writeup[1] of the kit artists at Bethesda for example.
> Of course, there’s another reason that Skyrim had only two full-time kit artists; kits are really complicated things to work on. Kits require not only the artistic ability to produce high quality visuals, but also a technical competency in their art tool, a deep understanding of the editor and design workflow, and so on. This unique blend of left and right brain is somewhat at odds with what many art professionals value. I've worked with great artists who make excellent kits but hate working on them - so they don't.
> So when you’re trying to identify somebody with the the aptitude and interest to be a great kit artist, you’re basically looking for a unicorn. They're rare.
And they better be paid accordingly so they don't bolt and start their own game studios! You get to negotiate if you're a unicorn.
[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/...
Not really.
About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Solid tech chops, but also with an eye towards gameplay you can bet they tweaked the shit out of our game system. We only had 3 'dedicated' designers so a non-trivial amount of work fell in the dev's hands.
To get concrete the smoothing/sticky algorithm and tuning of our aiming mechanism was created and owned by a single dev. Take a look at this[1] for a good breakdown of what goes into something like that.
[1] http://drstrangevolt.blogspot.com/2012/12/aim-acceleration-i...
I don't feel like you're disagreeing with me.
It just sounds like the roles on your team were more blurred but the point still stands. What's meaningful isn't your title but the type of work you do. The more influence you have over the design of the game, the bigger an impact you will have on how fun it is.
In fact the want to know what the largest predictor of if a game is going to be fun or not?
Talk to any game designer and they'll tell you it's the iteration cycle time of their tools. They'll be the first to admit that they don't know what fun is(otherwise we'd just formulate it, bottle it up and fire all the game designers). The more they can throw things at the wall that "stick" the better chance a game has at being fun.
I also can't think of any team I've been on my career(or other teams I know of) where roles weren't "blurred" it's expected and required in the industry even on large, AAA teams.
There's only one Shigeru Miyamoto.