There seems to be a heavy trend in recent years towards all-in-one authoring tools. (unity, blender, unreal, etc)

Im alittle skeptical of this, from my personal experience it tends to blur roles in the team, and promotes "pixel pushing" instead of solid design principles. i also get very confused with graphical programming for large projects too.

but i was wondering what everyone elses thoughts are? best thing sliced bread? a fad? or a burden?

cxzuk

The idea is to provide a toolchain for the user so they don't have to walk to 17 different places to get the work done.
I personally like it that way because i'm doing all, arts, sound/musics, programming, and having access to all of this easily will ofcourse benefit my workflow.

I guess it could blur the roles since a non-artist can easily go in some particle effects and tweak some properties easily since he's working in the same tool anyways. But in a structured team you usually have designers and programmers doing what they can do best without meddling into others affairs if they do not know what they are doing.


But obviously there are always tools that work differently, that you might prefer ui or functionality wise so even if tool kits provide a one-for-all solution that doesn't mean you have to resort to it.

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wzl's burrow

The trend may have leaned this way a little more the past few years, but it's nothing new. For example, you had tools like Game Maker, and Pie 3D, back in the early 1990s which more or less followed the same principles. (I purchased copies of both packages. I also recall at least two others being existent or under development, though I don't recall their brand names.)

I don't think the game factories (i.e. all-in-one authoring tools) are really taking over game development or anything, though. Some people use them, many people still don't. The nice thing about them has always been that a game designer could build a prototype for an idea to pitch to more experienced devs... also, smaller teams can accomplish greater, more sophisticated feats of production value with roughly the same amount of work (or less) than doing things from scratch.

As with most anything, it's a pros-vs-cons scenario. Preference wins the day, yet again.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."