For further insight into how replacing existing art works:
You name the file the same way the old file was named. Delete or rename the old art in the project. Then drag and drop the new art into place. This way you keep both versions in our files but the new version will replace the old version in the game project when the next builds are done.
So it’s basically a drag and drop to replace art. The person who does the builds is already doing the builds so it doesn’t add more work to their plate as they’re already doing the thing.
No programming knowledge necessary for this.
However, our artists are also experienced in using Unity (the game engine we use) so if they need to implement new art they can also do that, again without needing to know how to program.
We do have technical artsists who are hired to bridge the divide between programming and art, but their jobs are more technical art like optimisation which requires being able to program and knowing how to keep things looking good so you need an eye for both as well as developing tools for the artists as well as many other tasks where both art and programming knowledge is needed for the task at hand. This is a full time job which is 100% necessary to keep the game running nicely on everyone’s devices and also keeping the art team efficient with tools as doing art by itself is a full time job when we’re releasing new content every week. We don’t pull Tech Artists off Tech Art and onto gameplay dev, those are 2 quite different areas of expertise. A gameplay dev won’t necessarily know how to do Tech Art tasks well, and a Tech Artist may not have ever done gameplay programming. Of course there’s exceptions, it depends on each individual’s work and study background.
If you are interested in the different game development roles and how game dev teams are structured there are some great youtube videos out there and I definitely would encourage you to watch them if you’re interested in how things work behind the scenes. I obviously love this stuff so it’s cool when other people take interest and want to talk about it in a generic way (I can’t sit here discussing the minute details of IP2’s every inner working, but we’re not exactly reinventing the wheel over here anyway so the youtube videos cover it).