Hi, I'm a student trying to learn as much about the industry as possible. I want to know, how important is it for a gameplay programmer to be able to modify a game engine? I'd imagine it's a plus. But is modifying an engine something that normally falls to the gameplay programmer or is there a different role specifically for modifying the engine?
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How important is it for a gameplay programmer to be able to modify a game engine?
Frankly, it's generally not that important for a gameplay programmer. Of course it always depends on the studio and as you say it can be a plus.
If a team is making engine modifications, that can fall to a wide range of programming roles. Graphics, Physics and Animation programmers are usually at the highest “risk” of needing to modify the engine. Some studios may have a dedicated group (sometime called Systems Programmers) for dealing with an engine. Studios with a home-grown engine may even have people classified as an Engine Programmer.
As the Lead/Senior Gameplay Engineer, I've made a few engine modifications to UE4 but have made quite a few requests for changes/fixes through our Systems team as well.
Gameplay programming tends to be the entry level slot that a fresh grad, no professional experience, would get put into. It tends to be the most forgiving, allows interaction with the widest range of problems and quite honestly can keep the possible damage they could do to a minimum. Engine changes are somewhat antithetical to those ideas.
As the portion that makes a game the most unique from any other game, gameplay tends to be the custom code that regardless of engine has to have been written in-house and is not part of the engine. As such and gameplay modifications will be to those systems that have be built on top of the engine and not the engine itself.
However, the higher your level of understanding of the engine that your using be that Unreal, Unity, GameMaker, etc the better you'll be able to do any of the tasks assigned to you.
Like most job titles, exactly what you do varies widely between companies, and between projects.
As MagForceSeven wrote above, if you are writing gameplay logic you probably won't be touching the engine.
patmiller said:
how important is it for a gameplay programmer to be able to modify a game engine?
It depends tremendously on the game, and the game engine.
If you're using a custom game engine, eventually you'll be making changes to whatever the game uses.
If you're using UE4, there is a chance you'll be modifying the engine code, but many games ship without any engine changes at all.
If you're using Unity, you probably won't be modifying the engine code unless you've got a large contract with the company. But you as a programmer should understand how it works, more or less.
patmiller said:
But is modifying an engine something that normally falls to the gameplay programmer or is there a different role specifically for modifying the engine?
It all depends on the company, the team, and the project, and there is no standard.
Some studios have a job title of “game engine programmer”, just like “gameplay programmer”. With or without the role, many times the work falls to a senior developer on the team, or it falls to whoever happens to need to modify it.
If you have the capacity to modify the engine, and you need to modify the engine to accomplish your task, then modify it.
In addition, you always should know your tools so learn them. There is so much code you can write and even more code you write that needs to be optimized because an engine, a system or a component of the game works in a way people decided it does is intercepting your gameplay code so be aware those behavior and know what is going on behind the scenes to be able to optimize what you contribute to the game
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