Lets get straight into it, the L4D2 boycott means the following:

1. The games industry has reached mature adult status
2. Depending what Valve does from here, it may not see itself in the “Big 5″ for much longer
3. It’s not just about the money

The games industry has reached mature adult status

This isn’t the first time gamers have complained about a game.  Truth be told, gamers don’t stop complaining about games.  However, this is the first time a large group of gamers, with an intelligent manifesto have come forward with a mature complaint.  Gone is the tantrum styled foot stamping the games industry is used to.  We’ve moved beyond our simple bitching and into the realm of mature adults, where genuine concerns are raised and a solution put on the table.  The ball is now in Valve’s court…

Depending what Valve does from here, it may not see itself in the “Big 5″ for much longer

Firstly, you may be asking what the “Big 5″ is.  This is the group of major game studios that are highly respected and form the backbone of the games industry as it stands.  I’ve formed this list after many late night discussions with game developers discussing who’s doing it right, and who everyone really wants to work for.  These include:

• Valve (L4D, Half-Life)
• Relic (Homeworld, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, The Outfit)
• Bioware (Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect)
• Blizzard (Starcraft, Warcraft, WOW)
• Bethesda (Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3)

A mature, valid complaint has been handed to Valve.  How they react to this is going to shape both their business into the future, as well as the games industry as a whole.  If Valve treat this as the prepubescent tantrum they are used to, they could see themselves in deep water.

The easiest solution for Valve is to simply ignore the boycott and move on, business as usual.  This is the most likely outcome, however they have a great opportunity to set an example for other big studios.  Surprisingly, it’s been gamers who have stepped up to the mark with this mature response.  It’s important that Valve think long and hard about how they respond to this.

It’s not just about the money

This brings me to the core issue here.  Since games were first made, there has been a gradual movement from making great games, to making games that sell well.  While this was inevitable as game studios moved from backyard, small teams to large corporations with share holders to keep happy.  This has gone on in the background and gamers have more or less accepted it.  The symptoms have been a reduction in game quality, a focus on sequels/safe games and what some call a “watering down” of what games are really about. The boycott has brought this quest for money into the open and is asking one of the worlds greatest game studios a question.  What’s more important, great games, or lots of money?

Limited choices

Sid Meier once said “A game is a series of interesting choices”.  This is the root cause of underwhelming games.  It’s as simple as that.  Games lacking enough interesting choices are doomed to fail.  I’ll dive straight into a couple of concrete examples then we can move out to a more abstract look at the situation and general ways to keep your game moving in the right direction.

Case Study 1: Dawn of War II

Dawn of War (one) is a great game.  It spawned the Company of Heroes series and solidified Relic’s position as one of the best RTS developers in the world.  It was elegant, with plenty of choice and plenty of emergent behaviour.  Company of Heroes took that to the next level adding more depth in many areas, while simplifying other parts of the game to make a cleaner experience.  DOWII tried to take the simplification too far with the following core problems:

• Linear tech tree cake
• Not enough unit types

Side Note: Notice I didn’t mention base building as a core problem.  Having no base building is a sure way to piss off a small, fanatical, part of the RTS market; however it isn’t enough to ruin your game.  It can be replaced with a tech tree that serves almost an identical purpose.  The problem arises when this abstraction is then hacked back so there is no choice in the progression through the tree.

Just to mock us, Relic gives us a huge printout of the tech tree.  But it’s not even a fraking tree; it’s just got tiers, like a cake!  The issue with this cake is that it’s the same every single game.  There’s no point even having this cake if the player isn’t given the choice.  The FPS world has a name for it, rail shooter.  I guess the best way to sum it up is “Rail-Time Strategy”.

The second core problem is the lack of unit types.  Once again, there simply isn’t enough choice.  The major problem here is the lack of emergence.  When there are such a limited number of unit types there’s no room for deep strategy, let alone emergent gameplay.

Limited choice in tech tree reduces strategic (high level) choice while limited unit choice reduces tactical (low level) choice.  Limiting one or the other is problematic, but limiting both is a sure way to under whelm.

Case Study 2: Battlefield Heroes

The core problem with Battlefield Heroes (BH) is the lack of emergence.  One of biggest drawcards for the Battlefield series has been the sandbox nature of the game.  Playing an FPS where a designer has scripted a hand crafted experience can be great.  Even better is playing a sandbox game where something new and exciting happens most times you play based on the small building blocks set out by the designers.  By limiting the choices too far, BH lacks this emergence without replacing it with a heavily structured gameplay experience.

There are too few class types and their differences feel superficial.  The core idea of classes has been watered down so the choice really doesn’t matter any more.  The strengths and weaknesses of the classes are also too watered down.  Is this to make the game easier to balance?  When there are so few classes, having an overpowered class can be disastrous, so the safest option is to make them all very similar to each other.

So complexity is the answer?

Obviously, adding a bunch of complexity to these games isn’t going to solve the problem.  The key is finding the right balance between too much complexity, and not enough choice.  Also, note that complexity and choice are not necessarily opposites.  You can add large amounts of choice without adding overwhelming complexity simply by making smart choices in gameplay and UI.

Automating no-brainer choices is a great way of reducing the burden on the player and leaving them to make only interesting, meaningful choices.

Bejewelled is a great example of a simple game that works really well.  Love it or hate it, it’s enjoyed by millions of people the world over.  It’s a great example of a game that’s extremely simple to understand, but gains in complexity and depth as you continue to play.  The player is simply swapping one gem with another, that’s it.  Yet layered on top of this is such great depth that players keep playing it for hours.  This is the perfect example of deep gameplay that is abstracted into the most perfectly simple interface.

Is it a cop out?

Is having less choice/depth easier to develop, balance and test?  Is this cut-back going to solve the problem of games costing millions of dollars to develop? No.  There are two ways to reduce the cost of developing games.  Make them simpler, or get smarter with how they are made.  With the right people, and the right processes in place to develop games, we can achieve deep, emergent games without blowing millions of dollars.  Agile development is a great way to reduce the cost of games while still producing extremely high quality.  Focus on making the game fun first and then decide how much money needs to be spent to polish the game up before it is released.

By having the core game created as soon as possible play testing and balancing can begin very early in the project.  This reduces the risk of many choices being difficult to balance as you have longer to make it work.

Making a game simpler to reduce cost is like changing the gameplay to make it easier for the programmers to implement something difficult.  This is the wrong way around.  Choice and fun need to drive the development of your game.

Check your game, right now

Here is a simple exercise for you to try on your current game:

1. Find someone that hasn’t played your game before, ever.
2. Sit them down in front of the game and get them to play
3. Ask them to say “choice” every time they make a choice in the game.
4. Keep a record of how many choices they make, either for each different part of the game, or grouped per minute of gameplay
5. Help the player if they get stuck, this isn’t a focus test

Once finished, have a look at your results.  What you want to see is a good distribution of choices throughout the entire time they were playing.  If there are large gaps, why wasn’t the player making a choice?  How could this be resolved?

Try this exercise yourself on other successful and unsuccessful games and compare with the results of your own game.

Conclusion

Have you played a game recently that’s been underwhelming or that you’ve loved?  Add a comment about it and we can continue the discussion.

Pie in the Sky

At the most extreme level, the perfect education program would be one attached to a large development studio.  Imagine if Valve had “Valve Education” where you could do a 1 year course and learn everything they know about game development.  Developers from live teams could take time off to teach for a while, to mix up their lives and to pass on their knowledge to others.  While it would make quite a bit of money, the key thing here is that the top x% of students could be hired straight into Valve.  Think of it as a 1 year probation period, where the employee PAYS to be there.  If there are things you don’t like about game programmers in the world at the moment you have the ability to teach them what you want.  Have a subject devoted solely to software practices, and fail any of the kids that aren’t up to it.

Down to earth

So if you’re not Gabe, then the above paragraph may be a little out of reach for you.  Don’t lose hope though, because there’s room in my dream for a less restrictive model.  The main ingredient for me is to find passionate developer’s who can also teach other programmers.  Seniors and leads out there should be doing it all the time, and we just have to get them together to start teaching students.  With the average length of service in the games industry being 5 years, there’s a great opportunity here.  Firstly, it means that it IS worth training up kids as there are a lot of positions that need to be filled by people that don’t have any real world experience in games.  Secondly, it means that there are a lot of developers burning out and wanting to leave.  Rather than going off and becoming business programmers, why not give them the opportunity to use their precious game dev skills.

What’s needed here is a bunch of truly experienced developers getting together and teaching kids exactly what they need to know to make games.  In 1-3 years, the kids should be able to pump out a handful of little games, and one big collaborative game at the end.  Heck, you could even sell the large game at the end and give the students a discount on their fees based on how well it sells.

Bureaucracy and Money

The biggest issue I see with current game dev courses is the amount of bureaucracy that’s involved in setting up the course.  It’s obviously going to be better to have the course meet requirements for a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent, but try not to let this ruin the course itself.  From what I’ve seen in courses there is a lot of irrelevant material taught.  If this HAS to be taught then do it quickly, and get it out of the road.  The key here is teaching kids how to make games, and make them well.  If the course is set up to make money then there’s a good chance it’s not going to work.  The main focus here needs to be making good game programmers.  Once you start pumping out awesome programmer’s I guarantee you their tuition fees will be the smallest part of your income.  You’ll have people wanting to pay top dollar for your students, people will want to start advertising to your students to use their tech and you could even secure a deal with a certain large video card manufacturer to focus your education on their cards.

Conclusion

There is a massive market for game development education at the moment, a vacuum I see filling very quickly.  I just hope that at least some of the new courses are better than the ones I’ve already heard about.  So there is my dream.  I’m a little too poor and busy right now to set this up, so I’m leaving it for anyone else to try.  Let me know how you do and we can work out the commission I get later.

It started with Westwood

Anyone who has known me for more than a few years will know that Westwood Studios used to be my favourite games company. In fact, I joined the games industry mainly because of the games they produced, and an article I read by Erik Yeo who worked for Westwood. So what does that have to do with EA buying Bioware? Well the more astute in the audience will know that EA also brought Westwood. From that point on, Westwood slowly but surely died. Whether it happened instantly or over the course of a few years (C&C Generals wasn’t too bad) it’s fair to say that it eventually did die. I would hate to see the same thing happen to Bioware. Unfortunately though, most signs point to the fact that it will.

Is it really over?

Mass Effect is going to be one of the biggest games of the year. Bioware have brought out a bunch of awesome games in the past, including Neverwinter Nights which even got my wife back into gaming. So the real question is, can they withstand the onslaught of all that is EA and survive? My naïve optimistic persona says yes, of course they will. However, my realist persona knows that its only a matter of time before Bioware employee’s start getting stepped on, or even just the knowledge of what’s happened in the past (ala Westwood) encourages them to move on.

There’s not a lot of point speculating too much about what will happen. As always, time will tell, but I implore EA to change their ways and let Bioware do its own thing, something which obviously works.

Below is a breakdown of the hours it took to create:

I’m quite impressed with HGE’s ease of use and will be looking to do a few more small games like this in the coming weeks. The features of note are:

- Dynamically generated levels using a seeded random number generator. This means that there are an unlimited number of levels that play the same way for every player.
- Online scoreboard. Your scores are uploaded at the end of the game and you can compare with other players. Simple encryption was used to stop abuse.

If anyone is really interested in the source code please add a comment and I may look at releasing it in the near future. I’d be interested in any comments or bugs. My main aim was to keep the development short so I missed out a few features I’d like to have added. These include audio and animations when the objects die.

Download the game below and let me know what you think.

Game 1

Controls:
wasd – movement
LMB – fire
RMB – shield
All enemies are red.
Reflected bullets become change to the reflectors team.
The uploaded score simply uses your computer name.

Thanks to Drealmer’s comments there are now a few more keys:
arrows – also for movement
zqsd – also can be used for movement on AZERTY keyboards.

From Bad to Good

I downloaded the demo when it came out, not expecting much as I’ve played most WWII RTS’s that have come out in the past few years (a lot). I played through the demo and was quite unimpressed. I also tried the multiplayer beta and I started to see what all the fuss was about. As I have a friend at THQ (thanks Damian) I decided to get it for cheap and give it a go. I started playing multiplayer and fell in love with the game. I was really bad though, so I decided to give single player a go to see if it was any good. I usually steer clear of SP in RTS’s completely, however after the first 3 missions I was hooked with SP as well. For some reason, the two worst missions out of all the Single player game were the two they put in the demo. I played through the entire campaign and both had a lot of fun, and learnt quite a few tactics to use online.

Unique ideas

Rather than give a regular review, I’d like to just talk about a few of the key features that makes CoH stand out for me. There are two unique concepts that CoH has that I’ve never seen in an RTS before, and I’ve played a lot of them.

1. Retreating
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I only just found out about this, 50 MP games into playing. I’ve always said that RTS games should have a good retreat in them making ‘running away’ a viable option in the battle. In every other game, retreating only works if you have a faster unit than the enemy, and even then, it’s barely worth using. CoH actually has a ‘retreat’ button which makes your men stop whatever they are doing, and run at great speed back to their base. You can’t control them until they are back there nor where they go so they can sometimes cross in front of enemy fire, however most of the time it works. This is pure genius. It opens up so many great strategies and means that one simple mistake isn’t completely punished by losing your entire group of men and giving the enemy precious XP for the kills.

2. Snipers
I’ve been thinking about snipers since they appeared in C&C and wondered how they could be implemented properly. CoH has the best implementation I’ve seen. Take the regular hide until they shoot, add in some detected at close range or by a recon unit and you have a fairly standard sniper dynamic. This is done in a lot of games and works well. Where the guys at Relic have excelled is adding an extra element to the hidden status. The first few times the sniper fires it becomes visible for a brief instant, not long enough for an MG nest to re-man the gun to return fire. However after quite a few shots, the length of time he becomes visible increases, until after quite a few shots he is visible continuously. Just like in real life, the sniper gives away his position more actually the more he fires. It also means that a sniper can’t simply decimate enemy squads without moving around or having some kind of support.

It’s all about the tactics

Once you’ve played a few weeks of CoH, nearly every other RTS feels like it has no strategy (I’m talking about you Tiberium Wars). In CoH you can use every part of the terrain to your advantage from dead cows to walls to buildings. Unlike in nearly every other RTS where hopping into a building is a sure way of winning, in CoH it comes with its own disadvantages. The key here is that there is no perfect strategy that will always win the day. You may figure out an awesome setup (like putting MG’s at all the choke-points around a map) but there’s always a counter to the strategy. I’ve played 50+ games online now and I’m still continually learning tactics and counter-tactics each time I play.

A simple example of this is the movement of your troops around a map. When you start playing you figure out fairly quickly that different objects on the map supply your troops with different amounts of cover. The green, yellow and red shields denote Heavy Covert, Light Cover and Exposed respectively. Easy to pick up, instant strategy added at little cost. In fact, you don’t even need to worry about this if you don’t care. Players can just move their men around and they’ll automatically move to cover if left exposed. Once you move on though, you realise that each type of cover requires your men to position themselves differently. If you make them all huddle around a burnt out wreck they will have great cover, however they’ll also be tightly bunched. This means that throwing a grenade their way will inflict major casualties, negating the advantage of the cover. If you’re quick though, you can start out in good cover, draw the enemy out and then retreat to a more spacious but less protected area as the enemy draws close to throw their grenade. This kind of simplicity with layers of complexity is what RTS games should be all about.

Conclusion

So my recommendation if you haven’t played CoH is to go to EBGames or equivalent and buy it. Try it out for a week and try and get as far into the Single player game (and a little multiplayer) as you can and decide if you like it. If not, take it back, free of charge, but I’m fairly sure once you start playing you’ll see how truly original and deep the game is.

This is just a quick post to say happy Easter and let you know how things are going at the moment. Things at work have been going crazy leading up to big milestones so I’ve been putting in 10+ hour days for a while now. This has left me little time to work on my latest blogs, but rest assured, I have a number in the works. I’m currently playing Silent Hunter 4 in all its bugginess and as usual still playing as much Company of Heroes as I can with my limited spare time.

CIC is moving along quite slowly. I’m looking to convert my engine to use 64bit floating point numbers (doubles) so I can accurately represent the entire Solar System down to centimeter precision. Once things settle down at work (probably not for a few more months) I’ll look at getting back into ~10 hours a week so I can make some more progress.

I’ve had some requests for blog articles which I’m working on at the moment. If anyone else has any requests please post a comment and I’ll write up an article if I know enough about the subject. Until then, have a great Easter.

2D vs 3D
So why does SC seem to be so much more complex than TA? Part of it comes from having a 3D world, with different camera angles, zooming etc. In a 2D fixed view, artists can create units and know exactly what the player will look like on the screen in the final product. With complete freedom of movement and zooming units appear from tiny dots to huge models taking up the entire screen. This makes it difficult for artists to make each and every unit look different from the others at every angle. If all the units look fairly similar from afar, players have to zoom in to a certain point just to tell what type of unit they are looking at.

Another problem with this is that I spend most of my time in SC zooming in and out. Having the mini-map as part of the world map is a good idea in principle, however it means that instead of just clicking on the mini-map to move to a different area I have to zoom out, move the mouse possibly the entire length of the screen then zoom in again. I much prefer Company of Heroes’ (CoH) approach where a single click brings up the mini-map and all units are represented as small icons showing exactly what type of unit they are. SC tries this however with so many units there aren’t enough icons to differentiate them. The highest fidelity you end up with is the type of unit (air, land or sea) and its attack type (anti-air, ground etc).

Too many units
There are two parts to this problem:

1. Too many different types of units
2. Too many units to control at once

The human brain can only track a finite number of things at once. Having 10-20 units in most RTS games is hard enough to deal with, but having hundreds of units is just unmanageable. The player stops caring about their individual units and starts treating them as groups. Why bother having so many if you will be viewing them most of the time as a whole bunch of icons that move across a 2D map?

Having so many different types of units means that units become obsolete. Why have so many unit types if a lot of them don’t get built for the majority of the game. Wouldn’t it be better to have a smaller set of units that are utilized throughout a game? I’d rather see a smaller set of units with more strategic options for each unit.

Upgrades, Upgrades, Upgrades
SC has gone crazy with the upgrades. Most structures each have to be upgraded individually to get any benefits. What’s wrong with abstracting this away to have upgrades affect all of that particular building/unit type? It seems crazy to spend quite a large amount of game time going around and checking which mines have been upgraded making sure none have been missed. Also, why 3 levels of upgrades? Why not 2? This kind of complexity seems to be in the game just for the sake of it.

UI
I’m also a fan of less UI in games. The first thing you notice in SC is the overwhelming interface. Resolutions have gone up quite a bit since TA, however it seems that less of the screen is actually taken up by the 3D world. At the low resolution I must run the game (on my 6800GT) it seems as though almost half the screen is taken up by the UI, and most of this is just the background image. Surely they could have reduced some of the complexity by hiding it from the user with automation of context sensitive UI.

Resources
For those that like Supreme Commander, I can already hear what you’re going to say:

“But Doolwind, they’ve managed to keep it down to 2 resources, even Company of Heroes had 3″.

I agree they’ve done well to keep them down to 2 in with today’s “more resources = better game” delusion many developers have. The problem here is how they use these resources. When I go to build something, I have take into account how much mass and energy it costs to build; then how much it will use once it’s finished. If I upgrade my mass extractor, I have to do some math in my head to calculate how much mass I’ll lose while it shuts down to upgrade, then how much it takes to actually build the thing. I’ll have to make sure I don’t upgrade too many at once or I’ll have a shortage meaning the upgrade takes longer etc*. Another problem is the fact that some units take resources to fire their weapons. This wasn’t a real problem in TA; however with of SC’s other complexities and now even more units that can eat resources it becomes unmanageable quickly.

*I am aware that you can pause the upgrade; however it seems they fixed the effect of the problem (players often make a bad decision) rather than the cause (that the resource model is too complex).

Conclusion
While Supreme Commander isn’t terrible, I’m trying hard to enjoy it, but so far I haven’t. I’ve did buy it however I’m sure it’ll probably be on my shelf and I’ll be back to playing CoH in a short time. I love my complex/deep strategy games; however I love the complexity in the right places. Players should be choosing the arcs of fire or types of units to build to counter the enemy; not remembering whether they have 20 mini-assault anti-air amphibious attack tanks or 30 of them. The idea behind SC is a grand one, and I wish it had worked, I really do, however it didn’t. Maybe it would have been better to build some decent AI that could actually manage the hundreds of units. If I have to watch another of my anti-air units run up and stand next to an enemy ground unit they can’t even attack or accidentally win a game because the enemy commander is so stupid it just stands there until it’s destroyed, I think I’ll scream.

Read the article here first.

A bit of background
Game programming is one of the hardest forms of software development I’ve worked on.  From my experience, most poor saps can’t even program, let alone create complex games.  I used to work as a business applications programmer and I’ve found that games have one particular ingredient that makes them far harder to develop than most other apps.  That ingredient is ‘fun’.  You can’t easily measure it, set up a list of requirements nor do test cases to make sure it’s there.

Another area to discuss is languages.  The article talks about Basic and Assembly, and thankfully we’ve moved on from these horrid things.  While it’s great fun to hack away in close to machine language, the fact we have much higher level languages means we can spend more time making the game, and less making the computer do what we want.  Many people believe that C++ is old and useless; however it’s still the best choice for making games.  While it’s better than assembly, it’s still quite low level, allowing us to directly access memory and have lots of fun with raw pointers.  Many people still can’t get their head around such things (they’re called Information Systems majors).  While java and .net may be good for beginners, all the work they abstract or hide means the programmer doesn’t fully know or control what’s going on.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to start using a language like C# to make games, however at this point it isn’t really an option, but that’s for another blog.  Enough background, lets get on with the real story.

The Good News
A lot of the game programmers I’ve worked with have been up to the challenge.  Game programming is still in its infancy and we have much to learn from general software engineering practices.  A lot of the proven techniques to help with the complex task of developing software aren’t that difficult to learn, we just need to devote some time to learning them.  One of the hopes of this blog is to share some of the general software engineering principles I’ve learnt and share them with the game programming community.

The other good news is that not every position requires a John Carmack.  Even with little 3D and complex math skills there are plenty of areas of games development that programmers can work on to make successful games.  For every one hardcore engine coder on a project there are many gameplay, UI, script, etc programmers who must rely on creativity more than just pure programming skills.  With engines such as Unreal 3, a lot of the complex work is done for programmers, leaving them with the task of making a fun game, rather than writing the fastest rendering system they can.

The Bad News
While I’ve met many good programmers they are, unfortunately, few and far between.  There are plenty of programmers out there that can’t even put simple desktop applications together.  While making games sounds like fun, it’s also extremely complex, and a lot of these useless programmers just can’t hack it (if you’ll excuse the pun).  If you haven’t been coding since you were knee height to a grass hopper then you’re in for a long ride.  Programming is one of those things that people either get, or they never will.  Even if they ‘get’ it, games are so complex there’s a high chance they won’t be good enough to understand all the complexities.  It’s one thing to write code that performs a desired task, a lot of programmers can do that, but to write it efficiently enough that the game can still run >30 frames a second is a hard task.  It takes only one piece of poor code within the inner game loop to be slow and the entire game will bog down.  This is only getting worse as games become larger and more complex.  Add to this the fact each different console comes with its own complexities, pitfalls and challenges means that programmers must be completely comfortable with their language and general programming skills.

As game programming requires only the elite of the programming world there is an unfortunate side effect, the ego.  Game programming is one of those jobs that nearly any kid would love to have, and with so many people not being good enough, some game programmers take that as an opportunity to think they are the most amazing people in the world.  They often forget that their colleagues are in a similar situation and instead think they are better than everyone around them.  This is often called the “Prima Donna Syndrome” and I’ve seen it all too often from game programmers.  Awesome game programmers are like good looking people, it doesn’t matter how good they are, if they think they are the best, and act that way then it basically negates all of their ‘goodness’.  The problem here is that game development is a team exercise.  Programming is only part of the puzzle and people need to communicate well if the team is to succeed.  Within the small group of good enough programmers, there’s an even smaller group that can communicate well and don’t think they are God’s gift to the game development world.

The Pay Problem
Back in the beginning of game development, programmers were paid less than their regular counterparts.  The article paints a pretty picture of how it will be in the future (now) though.  Aren’t we lucky then that games are pulling in billions of dollars around the world?  Surely things would have changed since 1981 and this complex profession of ours would be receiving the remuneration we deserve, unfortunately not.

The majority of game programmers I know would take a massive pay rise if they left the games industry and used their genius elsewhere.  Combine this with much overtime, poor working conditions and generally badly run companies and there’s little incentive to stay in the industry these days.  Why else would the average years in the industry be as low as 5 these days?  Without having the pay to back it up, the industry is only ever going to get diehard gamers who wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.  Thankfully I’m one of them, and the current shortage in good programmers works out well for my peers and I, however for the industry in general it’s a problem. This pay problem is only making it harder to find programmers that are good enough.  A large chunk of the programmer market is simply not interested in the low pay and bad working conditions a lot of studios make them put up with.

Conclusion
So the simple answer is, yes, programmers these days are good enough.  The long answer is ‘kinda, it depends who you ask’.  There are plenty of Carmack style genius’s around at the moment.  There’s also plenty of people looking to the future of games from Tim Sweeney to David Jewsbury (who gave an excellent speech at game connect).  We have some excellent tools at our disposal, many different languages to choose from and an ever increasing budget to work with.  While I’ve met countless bad programmers, I’ve also met enough awesome ones to know that the games for at least the next five years are in good hands.