Of Mice and Pen: Pirate Art - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 226

Figure 10-4. Boxes and bushes with and without detail
Complementing the Code and Design
If there is one truly unique aspect about video game development, that has to be the relationship
between the very different disciplines involved in the production. Coders (or programmers),
artists, and designers each do very different jobs involving very different skills and abilities, and
yet they can work together in amazing ways while making video games.
Sometimes this relationship can result in something extremely cool happening in the
evolution of the game's design. This happens when one member of the team interprets the
output of another in ways that they had never intended, but the game becomes much better as a
result. Designers sometimes refer to players finding cool solutions to their games that they never
intended as emergence . This is just another kind of emergence, but one that happens at the
design stage rather than after the game has been released.
Emergent Design
The very first game I worked on was a racing game called Fatal Racing. My responsibilities included
designing and building the race courses using a software engine coded by one of the programmers
on the team. The engine initially allowed for rather straightforward race tracks that were flat and
went around bends, with the ability to make the road surface tilt a little. I soon started
experimenting, and realized I could not only tilt the road, but make it spin almost completely