Bethesda Softworks Inside the Vault Q&A
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What is the best part about working as a programmer? The worst part?
Being the (viewfinder) of the game world, almost every part of the engine passes through the interface in some small way so it's always interesting work. You never know what parts of the code you'll have to dig through on a daily basis, so you learn to develop a high-level working view of the game and its sundry interlocking parts, which can be terribly fascinating on a good day and dangerously labyrinthine and overwhelming on a bad one.
Also, the interface is always on-screen, the first thing the player sees, and that has its own pride. Then again, if the game breaks, it's the first thing that messes up, usually in a very obvious and distracting way.
Lastly, every component of the engine has some fussy part that's deceptively simple to work with, something insignificant that for some reason turns into a tangled mess whenever you touch it. For the interface, these things are always the most mundane, (who-actually-thinks-about-these-things) things, like proper scrollbar etiquette or the amount of time between a click and double-click. It's difficult to convince people to take you seriously when you tell them you've spent two days tracking down an elusive mouse wheel bug.
