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Q. What skills do you need?
A. As many as you can get and as diverse as possible.
Working as part of a team means that some individuals can concentrate on a narrower skill set. There is nothing wrong with that, and in fact for some kinds of work, it is beneficial. I know that a guy who is working full time as an artist is going to produce a highly polished job every time. I enjoy working with professional artists of that calibre because I learn a lot of useful techniques from them and that helps to improve my artistic skills. Likewise, I enjoy working with other people who have a gift for music and audio. To be able to pursue any of these areas as a specialist means that you can develop your art to very high level. But - you are also somewhat confined to only working in that area. One of my clients has the commendable aim of trying to let all the specialists work for a little time in other areas and disciplines. This is all to the good, because if you know even a little about the other areas that are involved, you can adjust and mould your output with your colleagues in mind and arrive at a more tightly integrated result.
Now this all applies pretty much to the creation of the asset base for a project. When we come to the assembly and programming side of it, it’s a bit different. I think it helps a lot, to be more of a generalist. I think this is where I have been able to utilise the experience I gained as an illustrator and an author to much greater effect. Because of that background, I have a different ‘world view’ of what I am trying to accomplish with the C-Code or Lingo or Visual BASIC or whatever I happen to be writing in compared with the way a more ‘purist’ programmer would see it. You should encourage all your programmers to understand the art at the pixel level. I don’t know of a suitable and specific course of study but there are many useful books that they should be encouraged to absorb. In particular, knowledge of palettes, blitting and interactive animation techniques is useful. Game programmers are especially useful and well suited to this work.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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