Hey, I'm The Manjaro. I'm a video game art student. Out of school I'm gonna put my work in the Pixel mines churnin' out assets. Beyond that I hope to become a Technical Artist. I've got the brain for it, I'm technically minded with a solid grasp of artistic concepts.

Of all the Game Development stuff I've learned in school, the one thing I want everyone to know is that EVERYTHING takes time and effort. Conceptualizing things and putting it into a document that someone can use to build the thing IS WORK. All changes need their due diligence in testing. There's a pipeline that stuff has to go through. It keeps things organized.

Quality Assurance is supremely important to everyone involved: developers, publishers AND the players. Gamers as a whole have become more development literate in SOME ways and that's great! But for some things they acknowledge their importance without understanding the effort that goes into those things. QA is a big one. It encompasses basically everything. Balance changes need QA. Changing a damage value might seem simple because JUST doing that is. But that's not enough. Nothing is in a vacuum and you need to iterate to tune the change. Some changes need to be lived with for a while to really understand. Balance is a concept that is in most players minds but it's incredibly nuanced and players are working with incomplete information. We don't see the ties between systems like the developers do. We don't really get to get to see the mechanics laid bare before us in data tables. More importantly, we don't get to see all the garbage they had to sift through to find a good result.

To change directions:
Do yall know what source control is!? I didn't before I took these classes. It's not something that developers really talk about. But holy crap NOT doing it can be CATASTROPHIC to a project! I had a teacher who had horror stories for us. He's seen it KILL projects well before they ever see the light of day. To put it simply, everything needs to be uploaded to a central database to maintain cohesion. You can't have more than 1 person working on a file at a time. Otherwise you end up with 2 versions of the same file and that causes all sorts of problems that can build up until your project is a Katamari. A big unorganized ball of entangled systems and haphazardly named assets. It's not a problem unique to game development so I guess that's why game developers don't really talk about it.

Anyway-- I just wish people had more respect for the things they know they don't know.