What does a programmer do in video games? Imagine you're at a picnic with your family and your mom brings her best friend over and says, 'Yaro, honey, tell Aunt Beru what it is that you do.' How do you explain what the heck a programmer does?
TL;DRProgrammers turn designers' ideas into working code and often build the tools designers use, also doing some initial UI and design work to test features before handing them back.
Well, trying to explain it to your granny is always a bad idea, because they're not going to be interested. But what we do is basically we turn the designers' ideas into something that will actually work in the engine. Often what we do is we make the tools that then the level and content designers use to create the gameplay.
Yeah, I guess Torsten comes up with an idea. He sends me a GDD. I then look at it, and then we translate it into code and tasks, and then do the tasks, and just combine the code together.
Well, depending on the feature, a lot of the times we will also be doing a bit of the initial UI work or a bit of the initial design work, because we need to actually test the features before we give them back. So you end up doing a bit of everything, honestly.