This way of thinking has caused at least a few prominent recurring bugs I can think of.

Texture resolution mismatches causing blurriness/aliasing, floating point errors and bad level design causing collision detection problems (getting stuck in the walls), frame rate and other update rates not being synced causing stutter and lag (and more collision detection problems), bad illumination parameters ruining the look they were going for, numeric overflow breaking everything, bad approximations of constants also breaking everything somewhere eventually, messy model mesh geometry causing glitches in texturing, lighting, animation, collision, etc.

There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of. They have nothing to do "with the hardware", but the underlying math and logic.

They're also not bugs to "let the programmer figure out". Good programmers and designers work together to solve them. I could just as easily hate on the many criminally ugly, awkward, and plain unfun games made by programmers working alone, but I'll let someone else do that. :)

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WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> getting stuck in the walls

I remember the early Simpsons video game. Sometimes, due to some bug in it (probably a sign error), you could go through the walls and see the rendered scenery from the other side. It was like you went backstage in a play. It would have made a great Twilight Zone episode!

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lukan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Game designer != game engine designer

(But it definitely helps if the game designer knows of the technical limits)

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sublinear 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sorry, I'm not super familiar with professional game dev, but I am familiar with professional web dev. The problems seem similar, as evidenced by the constant complaining here on HN about the state of the web.

Who formats or cleans up the assets and at least oversees that things are done according to a consistent spec, process, and guidelines? Is that not a game designer or someone under their leadership?

I think in all the cases I gave, what might be completely delegated to "engine design" really should be teamwork with game design and art direction too. This is what the top-level comment was talking about. Even when a game is "well made", they just adopted someone else's standards and that sucks all the soul out of it. This is a common problem in all creative work.

(adding this due to reply depth): Coordination is a big aspect of design and can often be the most impactful to the result.

	▲	lukan 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It depends how big the studio is, but a job of a game designer is usually not cleaning up assets. It is to well, design the game. The big picture.