Communications - March 2009

practice

Doi: 10.1145/1467247.1467262

developed in coordination with, the film industry. Unlike film, however, games need to be interactive. Player actions require visual feedback; game characters should react to player choices. Adding interactive features typically requires some form of programming. These features are also a form of artistic content, and game studios would prefer they be created by designers—

Better scripts,

developers who understand how the player will interact with the game, and what makes it fun—rather than software engineers.

Better Games The idea of game software as artistic content has led many game studios to split their software developers into two groups. Software engineers work on technical aspects of the game that will be reused over multiple titles. They work on core technology such as animation, networking, or motion planning, and they build the tools that make up the content-creation pipeline. Gameplay programmers, on the other hand, create the behavior specific to a single game. Part designer, part programmer, they implement and tune the interactive features that challenge and reward the player.

The gameplay programmer should produce fun, not complex, algorithms. Game studios design their programming workflow to relieve gameplay programmers of any technical burdens that keep them from producing fun. Often this involves an iterative process between the gameplay programmers and the engineers. The gameplay programmers develop feature prototypes to play-test before adding them to the game. The software engineers then use these feature prototypes to design support libraries, which are used to build another round of prototypes. This is an effective workflow, but game companies are always looking for ways to speed up or even automate this process.

In addition to supporting the interaction between gameplay programmers and software engineers, the studios are always looking for ways to integrate the designers into the programming process. Designers often

Smarter, more powerful scripting languages
will improve game performance while making
gameplay development more efficient.
BY WaLKeR White, chRistoPh Koch,
Johannes GehRKe, anD aLan DemeRs

The video game industry earned $8.85 billion in revenue in 2007, almost as much as movies made at the box office. Much of this revenue was generated by blockbuster titles created by large groups of people. Though large development teams are not unheard of in the software industry, game studios tend to have unique collections of developers. Software engineers make up a relatively small portion of the game development team, while the majority of the team consists of content creators such as artists, musicians, and designers.

Since content creation is such a major part of game development, game studios spend many resources developing tools to integrate content into their software. For example, entry-level programmers typically make tools to allow artists to manage assets or to allow designers to place challenges and rewards in the game. These tools export information in a format usable by the software engineers, either as auto-generated code or as standardized data files.