What's the difference between game development and business development?

Question

Like most developers, I'm a business developer, which in essence consists of slapping a UI onto some back-end data store. (We all know there's a lot more to it than that, but that's usually what it boils down to.)

I understand that game development is very different from business development, but I'm having a hard time explaining it to a friend of mine. I was hoping the SO community could help me out here.

To me, modern game developers deal a lot with manipulating 3-dimensional graphics. In gaming code (and I'm guessing here), you're assembling polygons (or something like that), rotating 'em, etc. This involves a different way of thinking from manipulating relational data (for instance). I don't know, really. I just know it's different.

EDIT:

I should stress that by "development" I mean "programming," not all of the aspects that go into creating a game or piece of business software. I'm sorry I didn't make that clear originally.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm in game development but came from business development long ago. Game development is very rigorous in mathematics if you work on the physics or graphics side. Even AI can need quite a bit of mathematics for the low-level stuff. The hardware usually takes care of a lot of the polygon manipulation math as far as drawing on the screen goes. There is also a lot of involvement with generating the in-game data with (often) many tools that are run in a pre-processing step, and that too can be math-intensive if you are generating visibility data.