When I started my career as a gameplay programmer, I was proud of one simple thing.
What I built was what players touched. What they controlled, pushed against, felt directly in their hands.
So to me, gameplay was naturally the most important part of the game. It was the player. Everything else felt secondary. Nice additions to complete the experience, but not the point.
I was wrong. It just took three jobs to find that out.
UI is not decoration
My next project was Just Dance.
And gameplay, in the traditional sense, is limited there. Some movement detection, sure. But the game barely lives in “gameplay” at all. It lives in the UI.
I was hired as an UI programmer, which wasn’t my specialty and definitely wasn’t my dream. But I had a ton of fun working with the UI artists. Because I learned something I didn’t expect: UI can talk to players in ways gameplay never could.
The first element I worked on was the raceline.
It was simple: a set of colored bars along the sides of the screen showing each player’s score progress. Previous games had represented the same information with dots moving along a central line. This time, the lines themselves grew as the players scored.
There was nothing mechanically different about the competition. But suddenly, it was impossible to ignore.
You could identify your position instantly from your color. You could see someone catching up without looking away from the choreography. And during playtests, the growing bars gave players exactly what they needed to start taunting each other across the room.
It was only a score display. But it changed how the room felt.
That was when I understood that UI was not simply reporting the experience. It was shaping it.
Everything had to be sharp, reactive, instantly readable. Every frame had to give players an accurate snapshot of what was happening right now, and push them to compete against each other in real time.
There was no controller input carrying the emotion. The screen was doing all of it.
I stopped thinking of UI as the thing wrapped around the “real” game.
AI is not obstruction
Then I moved to Assassin’s Creed Origins as an AI programmer.
This was to me the opposite seat of gameplay. I wasn’t defining what the player could do anymore. I was defining how the world answered.
And I realized something: what kept players inside that world wasn’t only the parkour, the swimming, the fighting. It was the atmosphere. How alive the world felt. How it reacted to what players did.
My job was no longer to hand players a toy and let them play with it directly. It was to make everything around that toy respond, believably, so the toy meant something.
I wasn’t controlling their actions. I was guiding the world’s reactions to them.
So I stopped thinking of AI as something placed in front of the player. It was the thing that made the world acknowledge them.
Coming back changed
When I moved back to gameplay on Far Cry 6, I had a strange moment of doubt.
Was I still a gameplay programmer? Did I even remember what made gameplay good?
That doubt didn’t last long, because I noticed what I’d actually gained.
I knew what good AI could add to gameplay. I knew what UI could do to support it. I knew how gameplay itself could bring AI behaviors to life in ways the AI systems alone never could.
Three disciplines, all trying to answer the same question from different angles: what does the player actually need right now?
What it’s really about
None of this is really about AI, or UI, or gameplay.
It’s about understanding what other teams live with. How they see the project. How something that looks trivial from where you sit can be enormous from where they sit, because you’re only seeing it through the narrow window of your own role.
Working across disciplines removes the blinkers.
It’s what lets you walk into a discussion with a UI programmer, or an AI programmer, or a designer, and actually understand what they’re asking for, instead of just tolerating it because it’s not “your” part of the game.
No matter what you work on, it reaches the player. It shapes the final experience just as much as the system you consider your specialty.
Leaving gameplay did not pull me away from my specialty. It taught me what my specialty was actually for.
So if you’re a gameplay programmer who’s never touched AI, or UI, or anything outside your lane: try it once.
Not because it looks good on a resume. Because you’ll never see your own discipline the same way again.