Meeting Victor Chelaru

In our meeting with Victor he explained some of the process behind creating a game and the pipeline of people it goes through. He drew a diagram how a common pipeline would work: it starts at the developer who makes the concept for the game, then the developer passes it off to two teams; the artists and the programmers. The artists then draw up all the graphics that might be implemented in the game before passing those assets onto the programmers as well. The programmers then have to take all of this and make it into a workable game which is then sent off to marketing to promote. The problem with this way of doing this is that there has to be a constant dialog between the programmers and the artists / developer. And each dialog that has data loss, ergo some of the idea is lost from the developers original idea to what the programmer completes. Victor estimated that about 10% of the information was lost each step, so by the time it got to the programmers it could be as low as 50% of the original information that was intended to be passed along.

A fix for this, that Victor proceeded to speak about, was cutting out the middle man. Ergo he said that the developer should be as much of a programmer as possible, therefore negating the information loss. By doing this the game's core concepts are all there. As for the artists he explained how they should have an easy enough time implementing their assets into the game so they can see how it works and fix it as needed, thus removing the dialog between the programmer and the artist as well. Now this is the best case situation and it may be hard at times to even come close to achieving a pipeline such as this.

To finish he spoke about our goals and how we need to focus on what we truly need. As programmers & developers, we shouldn't try and expect what to do way ahead of time. If we try to predict everything we'll never actually get anywhere with coding it, we'll be stuck in the theory stage. Also the best feedback is from those who aren't developers or programmers, and who aren't afraid to hurt your feelings.