[via Shashdot] ACM Queue has an article by Jonathan Blow on how game development has evolved over the past two decades:
In the past ten years, games have ballooned in complexity. Now the primary technical challenge is simply getting the code to work to produce an end result that bears some semblance to the desired functionality. To the extent that we optimize, we are usually concerned with high-level algorithmic choices. There’s such a wide variety of algorithms to know about, so much experience required to implement them in a useful way, and so much work overall that just needs to be done, that we have a perpetual shortage of qualified people in the industry.
Making a game today is a very different experience than it was even in 1994. Certainly, it’s more difficult. In order to talk about specifics, I’ve classified the difficulties into two categories: problems due to overall project size and complexity and problems due to highly domain-specific requirements. Though this will help me introduce the situation in stages, the distinction between the two categories is a bit artificial; we will come full-circle at the end, seeing that there are fundamental domain-specific reasons (problems due to highly domain-specific requirements) why we should expect that games are among the most complicated kinds of software we should expect to see (problems due to overall project size), and why we should not expect this to change for the foreseeable future.
