You mentioned how devs only are working on your “areas”. Is the version of the game you are working on somehow cornered off from the rest? For example, if you are working on part of an open world game, is the executable you are working on not have the rest of the world, or if you are working on a level, do you only have one physical access to that level?

boynextdoornews

We're basically cordoned off from other elements of the game for the sake of iteration speed. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to build assets and data for game levels, especially in AAA games. If I'm working on a particular level or dungeon, waiting for my workstation to build assets and levels for the entire game is a huge waste of time. Why would I spend the multiple hours it would take to compile, light, and build shaders, pathing, lighting for all the other levels I'm not working on? If I make a small change to the system I'm working on, should I have to wait and build everything else again? I'm able to work so much more quickly if I only have to build the parts of the game I absolutely need, and not have to build the rest.

I could go build the rest of the game if I really wanted to, but I have little to no insight into the state of the rest of the game. The levels may be in a broken or incomplete state. The UI might be in a broken or incomplete state. Game system X, Y, or Z might be in a broken or incomplete state. Progression may require certain quest variables to be set, but I wouldn't know because it isn't my part of the game that I'm working on. There's really no way for any single individual contributor (or even the leads) to really know how everything looks when we're one of a team of hundreds and we don't have the bandwidth to share everything with everyone. There's simply too much happening at once and too much to know for any one person to grasp it all on the regular.

This is because we're all working on our own tasks and don't really have the time or capacity to see or play with everything. We really can't have each subteam go around explaining it - we'd spend way too much time doing that instead of working. It's actually quite commonplace for subteams to have little to no idea what other subteams are working on at all. We'll often have a "show and tell" part of team meetings dedicated to different sub teams showing what they've been working on, because the rest of us really don't know. Sometimes I only find out what my coworkers have been doing because of articles in the gaming press!

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