No ones saying programming isn't important. And a smart, experienced code architect is a must to design structure that will alleviate downstream issues. But even that's hard as nobody knows which direction a game might go as it matures.
I'm just saying the butts in seats writing the code to make the designers vision a reality are not free to go rogue and throw in their own modifications and idea's. It simply doesn't work that way. It would be a disaster.
Sloppy code can cause trouble but not necessarily break games.
I had a specific issue along this line. The infrastructure we designed and rigorously tested based on early code builds, performed 20-40% less efficiently in live. Meaning now more servers had to be spun up than we had expected to need. It was costing a lot more money than it should have been. Something was wrong.
We beat on the lead programmer to fix his **** as we knew something had got screwed up.
Took months before the senior software architect found hundreds of unecessary logging functions that had been added and left in by his team which was killing server performance and generating millions of rows of redundant and worthless log content.
Once those were all chased down (we hope they found them all), performance shot back up and in line with expectations.
It was a big deal. Cost hundreds of thousands in extra server time and storage. (this was all cloud linux instances) It was just sloppy.
Using logging as a tool is fine and necessary. Multiple programmers replicating each others log functions and then not removing them, not fine.
@Vandraad
Vanguard was a fine game. It did have troubles early on. Took a year or two after launch before it finally got polished. But from then on it was good. Well until Smedley decided to try out FTP/P2W on it.
Brad is best thought of as a creative gaming visionary than someone that knew how to manage a game studio and get a product out the door successfully. In Brad's defense, it is very hard. I couldn't do it. As much as I'm not a fan, Smedley could, and did.
People wearing too many hats makes it extremely tough for small studio's to be successful.
