Doing what You Know and Doing What You Should

In the Game Development field, there are many people who knows many different things. A game designer may know how to animate, a game programmer may know how to draw, a game artist may know how to code and an animator may know how to texture. But what should we really be doing?

Should the game designer who knows how to animate go in and animate the artist’s model? Should the game programmer who knows how to draw, go ahead and change the concept art? Should the game artist who knows how to code, really go and do some coding? And lastly, should the game animator who knows how to texture, go ahead and modify the game’s textures?

Everyone should be focusing on the areas that they are responsible for and create the best work possible within the given time frame. “Best work possible within the given time frame” is very important because there is only so much time given to create and polish the work.

If that little bit of time is not spent on improving one’s own work, but rather on trying to “improve” somebody else’s work, or on doing more than required for the test of a new feature, something is wrong with the person.

Either, the person is not interested in his work, thinks his/her work is already “perfect”, or is just plain try to impress people with the large repertoire of “skills” that he/she possesses.

In every field or specialization, there are more details to take care of than meets the eye. More importantly, the person may not know as much as he/she thought they might know, and could end up embarrassing and making a nuisance of themselves more than impress.