When people often say to me "I learned all that maths in school and it was useless", I think to how much of that came in useful when I wrote my first 3D engine in my teens. Suddenly it wasn't so boring any longer.
When I started coding graphics in the early 80s practically every video game was a one-person show - every line of code, every graphic and every sound effect and line of music. By the time I start doing game development as a job in the mid-90s we were up to small teams of about 10 people, and we could all still go out together for a beer after work. Now look at it.. unbelievable how many people are needed for a modern AAA online game. I can't even fathom it.
Absolutely! When you take into account just the artistic aspects (e.g. modeling, texturing, rigging, etc. with professionals specializing just in particular aspects like facial structures, etc.), it really is quite remarkable.
I imagine we'll get more efficiency as procedural and generative techniques become more powerful: characters, worlds, mechanics, etc. are all programmatically generated with little-to-no intervention.
> I imagine we'll get more efficiency as procedural and generative techniques become more powerful: characters, worlds, mechanics, etc. are all programmatically generated with little-to-no intervention.
This absolutely has to happen because humans are really crap at some things, like animating human beings. When I was developing a 3D game in the mid-90s I watched our character animator trying to do the animations by hand and you can almost never get it to look remotely realistic; even now with mo-cap and bones and all the tech, it still looks totally fake (a big recent example for me is Thanos in the MCU who moves like a wooden puppet). It needs that ML layer to sit above everything and fix all the little details that make humans look human and move human.
When I started coding graphics in the early 80s practically every video game was a one-person show - every line of code, every graphic and every sound effect and line of music. By the time I start doing game development as a job in the mid-90s we were up to small teams of about 10 people, and we could all still go out together for a beer after work. Now look at it.. unbelievable how many people are needed for a modern AAA online game. I can't even fathom it.