You mentioned that some folks do environments and moonlight in props and weapons and ships. I can't think of anybody who's actively working on both ships and environments. I want to disabuse a common misconception in the view of all game development that everybody can just work on everything.

Oh yeah, you can't do that. Well, I'm going to counter it, because in a company like ours or large companies, you have to be kind of more strict on what people are working on, because otherwise nothing will get done. And you'd have a lot of people working on the same thing, which doesn't really work that well. Whereas I would say in smaller companies, and I mean indie startup type things, less than 20 people, you're going to be more useful to them if you can do more things. Because this is how I started when I was working in film. I think I joined as a character artist. I hated doing character art. It's just not for me. And I kind of moulded it, went from that. Well, actually I was probably a little clever: I knew a character artist at the time, so I got her employed so she could do characters and then I could do the thing that I wanted to do. So that's why I started doing environments, but because we were a small studio, I think I was number seven to join, you couldn't just sit there and be like, oh, I've done the props now, that's me done for this film. It was, okay, we need these environments doing, we need these vehicles doing, we need the set dressing doing. I also did baking of animation, so the animators would do their thing and then we'd bake it all into, I can't even remember what file format now, so long ago. And then we'd get that into, we were rendering in Lightwave at the time. So this was 2010 we're talking. But that's why I wanted to caveat and say, massively depending on the studio, the size of the studio is how many hats you'll be wearing.

But then it's one of those things where when you grow, when you scale up, it becomes important to have people specialized in certain areas, because people that tend to bounce from one discipline to another discipline end up not doing either one particularly effectively. At lower levels, the indie studio, like you said, it's necessary because we only have six people and these things need to get done. But when you scale to the size of the company that we're at, it becomes important to let the platform people do platform, to let the character people do character, to let the environment people do environment.

I'd also say that just because you're, say, an environment artist and you're working in a bigger company, you're not just, hey, make this room, next thing, make this room, next thing. You've also got to think about, and especially the higher you go up the tiers, you're more responsible, not only for your work, but also other people's work. And so wearing several hats becomes very kind of central to that role itself. So it's kind of, how is the team setting things up? How are we naming things?