The good, the bad, the ugly.

I've currently been looking at another code base at work and it's brought to light something I've known for a while, but which is now front and center. Not all programmers are good programmers. It's something which is pretty obvious, but what isn't obvious is the split. You would like to think that it's a pretty linear grade with even numbers of coders at each level, but in fact it's pretty biased towards the lower end and the numbers drop off quickly the higher you go.

Now the games industry is pretty hard to get into in the first place, so truly bad coders in our industry are exceptionally rare. Thats not to say we don't get them (and I think we have a couple in our company to be sure!), but most of our problems are due to the lack of training. We have a heap of juniors on our project and they just haven't been mentored correctly. Now for the most part they're all pretty good (or they wouldn't be there), but without proper mentoring they'll just do it their own way, and not the way they should. Training, and experience is everything, and while it's far easier to churn out decent looking games due to the sheer power of modern hardware, thats not to say that the underlying code couldn't, no shouldn't be far better.

This is much more important than you'd think. In the past you'd write a game and as soon as your finished, you'd hardly ever look at the code base again. That just doesn't happen these days. For starters, engines and tool sets take time to write, so you have to look after them and use them as often as possible. Second, sequals are very common and the turn around on them is usaully very tight, so having a solid codebase to start from is important which means you can't just fudge your game and forget about it. Companies are made on their I.P. and your codebase is a vital part. This means you have to not only value your staff, but make sure you train them as best you can, and I think the games industry as a whole fails in this.