Guilty Gear creator says it’s ‘very dangerous’ for developers to specialise in one area instead of trying new skills

Guilty Gear creator Daisuke Ishiwatari has warned about the dangers of making development staff specialise in specific areas.

In an interview with 4Gamer, Ishiwatari said he was concerned about the direction modern game development is going, particularly in AAA games where “overspecialization” is becoming commonplace.

According to the fighting game series creator, if staff find themselves working on a specific task or discipline for a long time, their ability to perform other tasks will be hindered and this could be a problem for future job prospects.

“In current game development, localized staff involvement has become a common thing,” he said (as translated by Automaton). “It’s very dangerous to spend decades doing highly specialized work, only to realize later that you’re no longer capable of doing anything else.

“You’ll find yourself at a loss when the project you’re working on hits a rough patch, and even if you quit your job, your chances of finding another one will be slim.”

Ishiwatari also referred to an industry in-joke about developers spending the entirety of a project doing nothing but placing grass on maps, saying these days it may be closer to reality than comedy.

“People join game companies wanting to create their own signature work someday, but in today’s market, those opportunities are extremely rare,” he added, explaining that the studio’s latest title Damon and Baby was designed with this in mind.

While developer Arc System Works is best known for its fighting games, Damon and Baby is a top-down action RPG, and was intended to be a project that would let the developers try something new, broaden their perspectives on game development and gain new experience they wouldn’t have gained working solely on fighting games.

Instead of splitting character creation into different tasks – where one staff member would work on modelling and another focused on animation – modelers were “entrusted with entire characters” so they could gain more experience working outside of their main skill.

“Compared to dividing tasks, it made giving instructions easier, and since they understood the character well, it was easier for them to come up with ideas and make revisions quickly,” he explained.

Ishiwatari is the latest veteran designer to suggest developers should broaden their skillset instead of focusing on a specific discipline. Last year, Kirby and Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai also noted that these days it’s rare to find an ‘all-rounder’ game director who has previous experience in multiple aspects of game development.

“In the past, there was a trend for a graphic designer to become a game designer and then a director,” Sakurai told ITmedia Business Online last June. “Nowadays, though, graphics alone have been subdivided into models, effects, textures, and so on.

“I feel that we are living in an age where it is extremely difficult to grow as a generalist. I believe that this increasing specialization and fragmentation is the cause of the shortage of directors with a broad perspective.”

This was seconded by former Nintendo composer Hirokazu ‘Hip’ Tanaka (Super Mario Land, Tetris, Kid Icarus, Metroid), who told VGC last year that learning multiple disciplines was important to ensure developers could understand each other’s work.

“If you have experience doing all of these various kinds of activities as part of the game development process, you know how it feels – how the people who are making it, how they think, and how they feel,” Tanaka – who is best known as a composer but also worked in programming and hardware design at Nintendo. “And this is something that can help prevent difficulties and quarrels within the development staff.

“In game development, there are a lot of times where people are butting heads over design and creative decisions. And if you can put yourself in the shoes of somebody else because you’ve been there and you’ve done that, it really helps you cut off those things and prevent those kinds of quarrels from happening or growing out of hand.”