The fact that you have such strict separation between programmers and designers leads me to believe your company hires a lot of people they don’t need to do jobs in a poor manner. I have very little respect for people who ‘design’ but can’t create.
This is the weirdest take I’ve read in a while… Thinking designers doesn’t create anything is just so wrong… And I’m not just talking about creating designs but also creating prototypes using components and e.g. unreal blueprints… Let’s not forget about taking the time to properly tweak values and all that…
I’m not going to share what games I’ve worked on as I like to have at least a faint divide between my online persona and real life one.
As a gameplay programmer I fully disagree. Just the ability to quickly ask a designer near you for clarifications or to if modifying the design slightly to save on time is worth soo much.
Asking over slack just isn’t the same as it adds more friction, takes longer, and makes it easier for misunderstandings to sneak in.
To be fair though it can be worth sometimes working from home to give you less distractions if you need some full focus time… And other jobs in the industry does gain a lot more from being fully remote…
I wasn’t trying to say you can’t do remote development what I was trying to say was it’s not a good way for the whole industry. That and pointing out drawbacks of full remote.