Moving deeper into my research into the different aspects of games development, I'm now approaching the programming aspects. Programming holds some intrigue for me, although at present it remains an area that I don't think holds much interest to, partly because of harrowing experiences with Q Basic and partly because of my existing skills being more art and visual based in nature (Despite the better pay a programmer can expect to receive compared to an artist or designer. And also despite my collegue that playtests for Valve telling me that they require all their staff to have a basic knowledge of programming in the Source engine). This is an area with a great many aspects and specialised areas, so I am really only scratching the surface until the second term in this course and thus focusing on a select few disciplines for the time being.
At the most basic level, a programmer interacts with both concept artists and other preproduction staff at the earliest stages of a game's development to turn ideas into working concepts and mechanics, and continually interacts with the creative staff and QA testers throughout as these prototypes are tested in engine and on created maps. From reading, I would say programming is especially important once the game being made has become more concrete in concept and tested mechanics have proven viable and enjoyable. Programming is also vital towards the end of production when communicating with QA testers to detect and correct bugs... this sort of work can continue even beyond the release of the product, most commonly in online multiplayer games.
Programming can be roughly split into several different catagories, such as engine programming (And physics programming, depending on the complexity required for the game environment) which take place early on, AI programmers and scripting programmers are also featured further in the development cycle, which rely less on so much building an engine as adding functions.
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