On: My first game with Carimbo, my homemade engine

[soggybutter]

Totally fine to paint in broad strokes, and I would probably lean towards that perspective myself. However there are some games that show off the programming more than others, at least in motion. Movement based games, like technical platformers or similar, have a lot of expression through the systems that govern them. Whether or not a game feels good is fairly easy to figure out after spending some time with it, but understanding what would make it feel better and how to achieve it is a much harder skillset to develop. Obviously non-programmers can work out in high level terms what might improve game feel, but I think you can get much better results when you have deep understanding of how things work, what's possible, and what side effects may fall out of a given change.

That said, some of the most fun mechanics are born out of happy accidents involving interactions that weren't fully considered so it's definitely not a constant

[seventhtiger → soggybutter]

I am being broad but to be more specific, if we classify games across two dimensions, one being tall (aka systems) versus wide (aka content), then I can't think of a single game that is more tall than wide. At best you get games which are squares, like tetris and pacman where a small amount of systems and a small amount of content go together.

For the vast majority of games they are very wide. Including technical platformers, which will have very finetuned movement systems, but they must be accompanied by a lot of equally finetuned levels. Another way of seeing it is that content is the "space" which your systems are expressed in, and more expressive systems require more space. A complex combat system will demand more enemy characters for its complexity to be relevant.

But I was only speaking in terms of programmers' understanding the nature of game production, rather than their actual contribution to the game. Of course there are very programming forward games, and entire genres driven first and foremost by innovative gameplay code. But even in those games and genres the programmer must understand that on top of the unique features that are being programmed, most of the important work will still be content creation. It's the nature of the beast. I'm a programmer who had to learn this the hard way. It's nothing like a software startup. It's more like a movie production with a software project inside.