On 'Developing'
"Developing" is a really lame word for making a game. Maybe cheapened by use (understandable), or by its association with less artsy software. Large productions, as with film-making, have evolved titles for various siloed work, but there's still a practicality and popularity of game developing as an individual practice for which the term feels lacking.
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Hobbyists like to use cute shorthands like "devving".
"solo devving".
ππππ-πΉππππΎππ.
ick. lol.
I was guilty of this when I was younger....
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"Game design" is even more lame and doesn't capture the work.
But there's not really a better word that isn't pretentious - I'm not trying to separate myself from peers.
In an old blog, I framed solo game development as hardcore weaving - a kind of meticulous balancing act where you're designing a large piece (such as a tapestry), making your own threads, lining up machinery, complecting them together and constantly re-evaluating. You can imagine this as metaphor for designing and implementing a game idea, and I stand by it. But 'dreaming and feverishly weaving' describes a lot of art...
I simply don't think I'm "developing" when I'm making a little wooden bridge or arranging ivy on walls, animating a character, picking fonts, doing sound, adjusting color gradients, or doodling castles and angry women in my canson multi-media sketchbooks that I keep switching between 7x10 and 9x12 sizing for because I'm not sure if I like the room or the limitations per-page more. Game work IS largely 'development', for the software, but mixing in the rest transforms it into some other craft/art/work that feels apart from drawing or animating or whatever by itself.
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"Writing" in the professional sphere has seen change into "narrative design" which I think is understood to be intertwined with game design, exerting directorial and/or feedback-looping influence on the project as a whole. There's an interesting thread there until you follow it to the end and find... "game design".
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The process has a lot of flittering attention, hands moving from one thing to the other. Make an animation, write some new code to get it in, adjust some color gradients, move on to something else...
Only more metaphors come to mind. "Stop-motion animating", "film-making", "model-building". Maybe "Game-building". lol. Game-making. π€¨
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Work words don't reinvent themselves though, really. "Game Developer" has already been canonized in the fashion that English describes things, with a kind of proletarian and straightforward stamp that I sort of respect.
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And a game is software. This has been keeping me up at night recently. We can make tools to have their creation be accessible; we can inlay them with art and sound and ineffable magic, but to play them in 25 years, work - difficult software work (development) - must be done to be compatible with newer hardware and operating systems. Games are high-level and arcane creations that probably won't last well across centuries and especially not across major disruptions - across conquest or pestilence, war, famine, and death. You can never just pick one up like a half-rotten book; a computer (and thus the games inside of it) doesn't even need to be destroyed to be inoperable, it just needs to lose power, lose operational knowledge, lose access to parts and maintenance.
So the fanciful alternatives one could imagine lose something. That sense of fate, that curse of the computer - that even a layman on a laptop is a humble developer of sorts, supported by a dense web of recent history and continual maintenance.
And I guess that's the in and out of it.
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