The thing I love most about the Games Industry are the teams. Artists, designers, product managers, programmers and testers all working together in a highly collaborative, creative environment.
On a good day it’s a huge amount of fun, and highly rewarding to see what such diverse talents can create when everyone is in the zone and combining their different skills. It’s one of the reasons it’s such a desirable world to work in, and why from the outside it often feels like some kind of magic.
When I was first thrown into this maelstrom twenty years ago, building the world’s first 3D games for pre-iPhone mobiles (with the amazing Ideaworks team) this way of working was the norm, and still is at most scales of game development. This was also true in the wider product development world, with web designers doing amazing things with CSS, content creators making rapid changes, and programmers working on functionality and somehow keeping the whole thing working.
Over the last decade or so though, we seem to have taken a collective step back. Designers workflows often end in Figma mockups, while product managers create detailed documentation to describe their ideas. These are then written up as change requests in Jira tickets, sit in a backlog for a bit, and are then picked up by programmers to actually execute. After a week or two, the changes are ready for review, notes may be offered and the programmers do their best to apply them. But this slow and indirect workflow often leads the team to give up after a single iteration when the new feature is ‘good enough’.
This isn’t to reduce the amazing work done in modern product development. Quite the opposite, our workforces are as talented as ever, and empowered by ever better technology and tools. But the overly siloed workflows and excessive handovers between non-programmers and programmers feel old, slow and broken. As a programmer myself, many is the time I’ve caught myself doing my best with grammar and punctuation, or margins and colour schemes, knowing that the person driving the changes would do a much better job.
So where is this leading? Well I’m hugely excited about what the next few years holds in this space. The rapid advances in AI tools, from Lovable to Figma exporters are helping get us back into a world where everyone, not just programmers, can contribute to software products. Today our feeds are full of excited vibe coders showing us the quick prototype, or simple business tool they hacked together over the weekend.
Our job now is to build the world where these features are making it into our actual products and meeting our real users. A world of cross-disciplinary, close collaborating and creative teams producing amazing work using the best of each members skills.
NiceGit has always been about much more than source control and file sharing. It’s about connecting the best of the new world of AI assisted product development with the existing world of product and software development. I’m excited to help make this happen, and for NiceGit to be the ecosystem that enables it.