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Comment by xsmasher | Hacker News Reader

Beacuse you can expose functionality to non-programmers and let them go HAM with the components you have created. I'm constantly amazed at what artists and animators and producers can do themselves if given half the chance. Plenty of people have the "engineering Tao" but not the training for traditional programming.

Removing the engineer from the content loops lets a lot of work happen really quickly.

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What type of games are we talking about here though? Removing the engineers from the loop potentially allows for a lot of rapid prototyping, but probably not a lot of shipping at perf on cross-gen console and PC architecture.

A proven by Minecraft, Angry Birds among others, you don't need a last gen perf game to pay the bills and get comfortable.

Every AAA is built like this

What's built in these things are quite often of 2 kinds:

1: Highlevel entity logic, something implemented by a number of game characters but nothing that really steals too much performance (and at that point could be rewritten).

2: Shader stuff that is often quite plain formula calculations that doesn't introduce extra iterations and most of that perf cost is just eaten up by the GPU's.

But most importantly, the initial iteration isn't always the same as the final product. If something really becomes a bottleneck a developer can often rewrite the stuff in a more performant way (and often still leave parameters available for tweaking).

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