Code and Content

In this product release I spent a good bit of time implementing quite a few reports. Our product has a reporting engine and the report content can in theory at least be created by anyone. For the out of the box reports "anyone" turns out to be the programmers on the software development team.

Most software products to some extent at least allow individuals other than the original programmers to add on content to extend the product and make it better. The reporting engine in our main products is an example of this. Generally it's good to have this. It allows more people to be involved with making the product better. It also allows the programmers to focus on the underlying core functionality and allows others with more domain knowledge to work on those areas.

One part of software development that really uses this is games. Creating a commercial quality game is a large undertaking. The number of people involved in putting a release together is huge. I've noticed that the programmers are only a small percentage of the people invovled in getting a game ready. Far more people are involved putting together the content around the game. One of the programmers jobs is to set it up so that as much of the work as possible can be done by non-programmers, the creative content people. The content people will do things like design levels, add player information, create storyboards and such.

A good example of this is the park editor in the Tony Hawk underground games. This game has a park editor feature where the end user can design their own skateboard park. The game itself ships with hundreds of parks already created. The park editor is an example of where there can be a real nice separation between the code and the content. The programmers were responsible to create the park editor itself and make sure it worked properly and was easy and intuitive to use. The content people actually designed all of the parks in the game using the park editor. With good communication, the content people will be eating their own dog food and providing feedback to the programmers about how to make the park editor better and easier to use.