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The last game that I had worked on (Magnacarta 2) taught me some valuable lessons in development and management. Since then I’ve been thinking about what would be the next most important step in video game development. In my opinion it is better tools.

Better tools make people more efficient. That way they can concentrate on making a better quality game instead of fighting to meet the deadlines.  To make this work one needs to slowly chip away at the hurdles that slow the pace of development.

Programmers already have a wide array of tools at their disposal and the tools are getting better. Compilers are getting better so are machines and the processors. Profilers significantly improved over the generations for both consoles and for the PC. Multi threading however is an area that needs significant bump in the tools.  I also think that a different language that supports threading as a core paradigm is better fit than C++. Of course thread profilers and threading libraries (Boost, TBB from Intel) are of great help, especially when combined with some of the design patterns that play well with threading (ex: Producer consumer, command pattern).

Artists, who compose at least half the development team, definitely need better tools. We need tools that revolutionise the way art is generated. The areas where I see significant improvements in the tools are:

1)      Procedural content generation – Great if we want to reduce the time to generate the content, reduce the size of the game (think downloadable content). The 64K competition is definitely a trailblazer in this segment

2)      Gameplay logic – Wouldn’t it be better if the gameplay designer could just create his own gameplay in the game inside of trying to convince a programmer and the team? I am talking about Kismet (Unreal Engine 3)

3)      Lip sync – It is time that we don’t have lip flapping and see good lip syncing especially for non English languages

4)      Automation tools – Tools that will give the artists an early red flag when content they add to a level causes a drop in the frame rate or pushes the memory limits over the boundaries

It is important to understand that a majority of the tools, including the level editor and modeling software are useful for both programmers and artists. Improving these will definitely make things better for artists and for programmers.

I can dream of a day when character rigging happens procedurally but for the next five years, I hope to see and build a lot more of these tools. Tools for creating content have been improving ever since humans desired to create art. From the cave paintings and the crop circles all the way to today’s video games and movies, they show an improvement in the kind of content we create. It thus makes me believe that improving the tool chain opens up new avenues for creating art.