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Comment by orangeoxidation | Hacker News Reader

> Virtually every other discipline in CS has moved towards loosely-coupled, composable components, but game development is still mostly happening against proprietary monoliths.

I'd argue that's because game development is not a CS discipline. Game tech / engine is, but games need more man-hours in artistic disciplines like modeling, animation, level-design, story-telling etc. than they need for cs.

There is a lot of 'game middleware' out there for the CS part of the equation. Game engines themselves are not monoliths, using 20+ middleware components is common.

The game design part is done using a monolithic interface to the technology (the engine), but that's because that job is not 'programming'.

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> The game design part is done using a monolithic interface to the technology (the engine), but that's because that job is not 'programming'.

Care to elaborate on how that's not programming?

Game Design and programming are two completely different sets of abilities.

Programmers can design a game, and game designers can do some programming, of course. But in modern days, the core way that both professionals interact with engine editors is completely different.

Game Design in general is closer to art or being director than to programming.

My wording might have been wrong there.

There's artists building the game experience and CS people building the game technology.

The latter do use and reuse smaller software components to build the level editors, scripting interfaces, particle physics, path-finding, illumination, etc. The engine. This job is very much like other fields of software development, not actually behind.

The first might write code (e.g. scripting), but they are generally doing so in a restricted 'monolithic' environment provided to make their job easier. They do not have to build the technology, they can just direct it, if that makes sense. Their job isn't typical software development, more content development, thus it seems a bit alien, behind from a software developer's perspective.

Ahh, I realized I misread it as Game Programming and Programming. Thought you were doing some hard gate keeping. I agree with what you are saying.

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