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Careers For Supervising Game Designers?
LeoDV writes "As probably 99.9% geeks out there I wish I could make my own videogame, and I avidly read the article "How Do You Become A Console Game Programmer?" and found the replies very interesting and engaging. I, however, have only very basic programming skills, and no artistic skills. What I want to do isn't program my own game, but design it, with an army of minions doing the programming and art for me. I know it's quite impossible to show up at a games company with a resume and say "Hi, can you give me a team of 20 experienced people, I want to make a videogame?" But part of me knows that it happened before (Ubi Soft hired Michel Ancel, creator of Rayman, at 17). So, is it at all possible to land such a job without those skills, at some point? If it is, what (short graduating in CS or prostrating myself) are my best options?" So, what experience qualifies you for a design position, what skills should you actually have to make games successful, and is this approach hopelessly naive?
What you're saying is kind of like saying, "I don't want to learn to be an architect, but I want to design buildings, and have an army of architects to turn my ideas into real building designs".
While it's entirely possible you could direct an army of game designer minions in creating a great game, it's just as likely that one of those game minions would do as good or better a job as you. Filtering for lead design positions on game programming experience is a reasonable filter.
Or, become a millionaire, and create your own game studio and fund your own super game!
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I support spreading santorum
My advice: Find your own 20 worker bees, and work hard to make something to show to companies. Then they might be willing to take the considerable risk you allude to.
evolution IS god.
I know this might not be quite what you're asking about but when people talk about software design, generally they mean on a software engineering level. It's my guess that 90% of game designers are software engineers as well. Case in point, Quake, do you really think they came up with the plot before they developed the engine? First they developed the engine based on previous experience and then they said ok great, find some artists and lets get this game to market. I'm not sure there's any shortage of good ideas for video games, but I'm sure most of the decision as to what gets made is made by marketing and upper level managers. Any idiot can tell you, "I want a game that does this, this and will do the dishes while you sleep..."
:)
Speaking as a software engineering student, you'd probably need knowledge of object oriented software design or computer graphics design to even get the ear of someone in the industry. If you want people to get to know you for your creative side, start writing books, designing pen and paper RPGs or get into some other creative avenue so you can demonstrate your ability to take a creative idea through a design and development process. Then maybe you'll get creative design priviliges
I'm a worldforge developer (well, thats stretching it a lot, but I develop a game, and use their stuff).
:) Dream a little lower people, please. hehe
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We get someone every week come in and tell us ab out their wonderful ideas.
I'm not actually being sarcastic, because people do come up with really good ideas - you see game designs that people have mulled with for years.
However, always always always, people's ideas are too big
If you have a big idea for a game, think about how it could be achieved in tiny steps. Then write about it. It is unlikely anyone will just code it, but if the ideas are good, and it is small enough to implement, then it might be done. I'm one of those that code, but don't have the imagination to design
So what is a small game idea? Well, to test the MMRPG servers that were written, worldforge wrote.. a pig farming game. You buy,sell and raise pigs, and protect them from wolves. Fun, small, finishable.
From there, it can be expanded, one chunk at a time. We have animated models now, standard templates so any texture will fit nicely on any model, ability to build buildings from building blocks as well as a proper physics model so if the building wall gets destroyed, or you didn't build it right, it falls over or collapses. The gui is worked on. The maths libraries. The connection code.
And so on. A huge huge amount of work and effort has gone into it. But at the end of the day the game was very simple and easy to do. But provides a small stepping stone for the next game, just a bit bigger.
That is how you have to make your game ideas in the opensource community.
Btw, if you think you don't have any skills, you are wrong. Everyone has skills that they can contribute to a project. Artists, muscians, writers, translators, testers (testers aren't really needed). But also people that take part in conversations of how to do the skills system, or the health, and so on.
I, however, have only very basic programming skills, and no artistic skills.
Seriously, you have no shot at a job in game development. Being just an "idea man" won't cut it in this economy.
Knowledge of programming does not make a person a game designer. Knowledge of games does -- what makes them fun, how they work (which is not the same as knowing how the code works), how to envision something that can be done with the resources available, how to communicate an idea, and understanding what will and won't sell.
There are such careers and they go by lots of names -- producer, creative director, lead game designer, etc. But they don't just hand them to people with no skills. Producers deal with schedules, criitcal paths, publishers, marketing, contracts and more. Some are actively involved in the design, others spend all their time managing. Creative directors can oversee several designs or projects at once, setting look and feel of the game, making sure gameplay stays on focus, managing designers, setting schedules, and sometimes actually designing. The best ones hire smart game designers and give them as much say as possible. Game designers do everything from documenting everything in the game, creating levels/scenarios, writing dialog and scripts, working with artists and programmers to accomodate their needs, to writing even more documents. Depending on the structure, they may only be following orders or may have a large say in the shape of the final game.
Getting any of these jobs means working in the trenches first. You have to learn the skills and prove you have them (usually with a published title) before anybody is going to trust you with this kind of job. That means being a game tester, writer, level designer, junior designer or whatever and clawing you way up.
How do I know this? Because I'm one of these people.
Remember, everybody has a "great idea" and everybody thinks they can be a designer. Far fewer can actually do the job.
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NO SIG
A supervisor should know the skills he is supervising... You should know programming, a little about art, a little about music.
But generally a supervisor will get the job after he has done some programming or other task. You have to work your way up.
***Note*** I'm not in "the industry" and have no real basis for the following assumption:
From what I've read and heard from friends, online reading, and print rags the videogame world is pretty much like every other industry, in that often it's not what you know but WHO you know.
That guy got hired at 17, but I'll bet that a lot of people at Ubi Soft knew him before hiring him. If you were a HR person would you ever take a 17-yr old's resume seriously for a big position without knowing him personally and his skill-set?
I say do like this: Make lots of friends, and use them to work your way higher and higher. Eventually you'll get a name for yourself and get somewhere big. Or you'll work for a company that makes games for Wal-Mart bargain bins. Either way you're working in the game industry!
You sound like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. Just because you think you'd be a good manager leading people doesn't mean you can lead a team when you don't know anything about their profession. Actually, that's not true. As a manager, you can enter an industry and lead it well (see IBM's CEO), but that's more the exception than the rule, and doesn't really apply to midlevel managers, which is what it sounds like you want to be. If you really want to be able to take on this project the way you do, put in the work. Join a gaming development society in your spare time, learn about what goes into software project management. learn about game management. learn the code , for gods sake, that's being written so you will understand what your developers are talking to you about. If you want to be really successful, you have to understand what's going on beneath you. otherwise you'll just be another PHB who looks blankly at his employees as they try to explain why a divide by zero error is a bad thing, and no, commenting out the offending line isn't going to fix it..
... But patients is required. It is unlikely that you'll be able to step directly into a role with a significant level of responsibility immediately, unless (as someone pointed out) you know someone in the Industry quite well.
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:)
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(I should know, I've taken the long route. Hi Simoniker, how're the states treating you
Design is a great place to be, but it is also the focus of a lot of the tensions of games development. It's an incredibly dynamic environment, and games development is full of a lot of creative talent. People skills are as important as creative and technical skills, and you'll have to be ready with an open and flexible mind. You'll need to be able to pick up just about anything, from audio design to particle systems to simulating wingtip stall on an Apache. Designers come from all backgrounds; creative, technical, whatever. It doesn't matter, as long as you can communicate a clear vision and get down to business creating it, you can design.
This is a fairly typical route into becoming a Games Designer; it seems to have worked for me
Start in test. Plenty of places need testers. The easiest way to a fast promotion into Design is through a dev company, rather than a publisher (the less corporate the better; it is easier to talk to the management for starters.)
Learn the industry, how the teams work, how the tools work. This takes time. Do it in small steps, get good at it. Testing games is a great place to learn about games development, although don't imagine it to all be fun and games!
Make your voice heard in the company. Don't try to tell people their jobs (you're on the bottom rung, remember?) but don't hesitate with an opinion. Ask if people need help with their design work, start putting together mission descriptions / puzzle designs / game pitches etc. Show that you know what goes into making a good game, and more importantly that you know how it can be implemented.
Eventually, quite often dependant on the timing of contracts and signing new projects (remember that games are more and more commercial!) if you ask you'll become a Junior Designer. From here, it's hard work and more listening and learning. Show that you have what it takes to finish a game, that you can create fun and can get other people to work to your vision, and you will move up.
For me, the Tester to Lead Designer road took 4 years, roughly. Most would probably consider that a little quick: I certainly have no illusions or pretentions to know all there is to know about design. I've got 4 published games, and a 5th on the way; I'm certainly no Miyamoto (yet!)
Don't imagine for a second that games design is an easy career path; it is very hard work, but incredibly rewarding at the same time. If you like games
Hope that gives you some insight.
Here's what might be a chance to get inside the industry: Darkfall Dungeon Design Contest
If you want to lead a team, you have to have the project management and team leadership skills and experience. Quite a bit of the success of a project doesn't depend on how good the idea is or how good the technology is. The success depends on the team's ability to deliver the project on time and satisy other goals (quality, among others).
Sure, design, development and doing great art is hard. But, getting a group of people to work together and keep the end goals in mind is harder. A lot of the failed great projects haven't failed because the idea or the technology was bad: they failed because the team wasn't able to deliver what they needed to deliver before someone pulled the plug (or got fed up and shipped the game before it was done).
If you want to increase your chances for being in a position to lead a game development team, particularly a successful team, you need to gain and demonstrate project management and team leadership experience. You might be able to get into such a position with just a great idea, a whole lot of luck and/or money, but there is a really good chance that the project will fail miserably unless you have the project management and team leadership skills/experience to carry things through.
Ron
What makes you think he didn't have any experience just because he was 17? He was probably already pretty skilled, or they would not have hired him.
The question that you have to ask yourself is, if you were in their position, would you hire someone in yours? I can't see any way someone would be able to get a job without producing something (even if unfortunatly sometimes that is a piece of paper saying that you are a CS graduate).
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Many people are trying what you want to do. The first thing you should do is register a project at Sourceforge. Then go around message boards and get game programers to join your project. While all the similar projects are in the planning stage and a 0% activity, I'm sure they'll take off an time now.
IMO games need a lead criticiser (LC), someone who has played hundreds of games and then works with the game from the design document right thru to publishing and sharply raps with a claw hammer all those stupid ideas that somehow make their way into games, and should have veto on release. Granted, not many games need this guy and I can think of a string of them just released which are great: GunMetal, Enclave, Red Faction2... And then theres the other sort of games: Enter the Matrix and Wolverine etc, recently. A LC was needed to point out that in their current state, the games are a detriment to the franchise, not an asset. I'm not sure that the game publishers are getting this fact. Yes, I know these games were under the gun to be released with the movies, but "simple" things like controls systems being bodgy ruined them. The LC needs to draw upon a vast knowledge of whats worked before and what hasn't and extrapolate correctly forward. They need to be smart enough to figure out what it is people (the market) expect for the next title in terms of quality and quantity. They need to know what the balance is between speed, quality and cost is that will satisfy the market, and convince the publisher and dev team of this. Luckily for us, most of the time a dedicated LC is superflous, but something is going wrong that the beta testers arent "fixing", and i suspect thats because the problem lies in the early stages of development. An alternative title for LC is "design document beta reader" =)
You aren't going to get a game design job without any experience making a game. There's just too many other people in line (i.e. everyone else working in the trenches dealing with the realities of making a game, dealing with hardware and performance limitations). A job in testing a game doesn't really cut it; testers don't make the game at all, their primary purpose is that of a very tedious and boring job of systematically making sure the whole product functions correctly, or tries to figure out and reproduce tricky bugs so that the (expensive) programmers don't have to waste days trying to figure out how to reproduce it.
This problem of everyone wanting to be a game designer is quite prevalent in many applicants, but the cold hard reality is you pretty much have to turn down anyone who says "I want to design games". There's just too many people with seniority already working there (wherever there is), waiting for their turn. If you want to jump from no experience to being a game designer, your only realistic option is to do it on your own time, at home, and if you are lucky get some other people to help out. Start small, or you will doom yourself.
The best kind of person for a game designer isn't someone who falls squarely into one of the main archetypes of game developer positions: programmer, texture artist, modeler, animator, level designer, sound designer; but someone who is a mix of programmer and one of the other fields and has some serious grasp of the limits of the underlying hardware the game has to deal with. Someone who is a pure programmer for instance, is just as terrible a choice as having a dedicated texture artist as a game designer. They woulnd't make the right decisions all the time. A programmer is probably likely to sacrifice a feature for the sake of performance when it might actually be worth it to go for a special visual that would make the game better. A pure artist is less likely to understand the hardware limitations as well as its strengths and capabilities. This is why someone working in QA has no chance, they dont have any of this experience. You need someone well rounded or at the very least experienced enough to make the right decisions for the game. This kind of generalization is less relevant as people get more experienced, but definitely true of the newer people in the business.
A true full time game designer is probably years away for most companies, because a large chunk of development time is still going to be making the game itself, in whatever major area they are best at, to help get the work done. If you can't help out in this area, there is little chance of being in this position. The scope of modern games generally doesn't warrant someone needing to make gameplay decisions for the complete duration of the project, as a lot of this is determined early in the project along with such things as what are the major technical features and the art style.
"There are such careers and they go by lots of names -- producer, creative director, lead game designer, etc. But they don't just hand them to people with no skills."
I can't count the number of Producers I've met or heard of who are those who have been promoted from the ranks of QA directly into producer, completely bypassing what it takes to make a game. These guys are the most dangerous people to work with, they have no idea what it really takes to make a game, they have no clue whats fun, they have no clue what the limitations are, and hardly even care about any kind of schedule. They want to endlessly tinker, now that they have suddenly (and unfairly) gone from a position of no power (QA) to a position of power (Producer) to fuck with the people who are supposed to be making the game, whereas previously they had no real power at all and feel the need to get some kind of revenge/power trip going.
This complaint is similar to that of Producer vs Game Designer, the Producer should let whoever the real game designer is do his !@# job and get out of the way, and just make sure things are running smoothly and help fix it when it isn't (including cancelling a turkey as early as possible, instead of stringing it along and making the developers live in milestone hell).
I wouldn't say it is impossible to get a job without any technical knowledge or art skills but it is a niave assumption. Considering there are probably thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people currenlty STUDYING and WORKING on games on thier own to obtain the same position you are tyring to get without any STUDYING and WORKING.
You can answer your own questions just by trying to make a game.
Start out and design it and either start programming and doing the art yourself or try to hook up with a team and do the work together.
You'll quickly find out that the task is a huge undertaking, requiring large amounts of specific knowledge and skills to get anything accomplished.
You will either:
1) Give up
2) Stop and learn what you need and tackle it later when you actaully have the know how
3) work your arse off and learn as you go and get something produced.
Choosing option 2 would probably be best (and thats what I'm doing) and after some study and expiermenting you can either try to tackle your origianl task or go look for a job, each making your question mute.
Choosing option 3 will make your origianl question mute, becuase you will have the skills and a product to show off in the end.
choosing option 1 will prove to you that you really don't want anything to do with making games and you can start trying to figure out something else to do.
Now I've seen Everything
Wow, I guess I just assumed that all of us geeks were programmers at one point or another. What other species of geek are there?
So.. basically, you want to tell programmers how they should program and tell artists how to draw with barely any knowledge of how a programmer programs and barely any knowledge of how an artist creates art. I think you should go read Dilbert. See what the pointy haired boss does and see if that's what you want to be doing for a living.
Check www.blitzbasic.com and download the Blitz3D demo. Prototype your game.
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
Graphics3D 640, 480
A lot of people have hit on the primary point here. You wont get far if you haven't cut your teeth on at least something. Reading game rags and forums may give you a good feeling for the industry, but once you begin really working at anything, trust me, you won't have time to read those things and you'll be more tuned in than ever to the industry.
So what do you do? Submerge yourself. Read dev magazines. If you're into art try 3dWorld and Computer Arts, and any gaming hopeful should shed the cheese to read Game Developer Magazine. You'll need to learn what design documents are, how to build them, how to work in a team and manage them, and how to market yourself to potential employers. And for the love of all that's holy, if you plan on supervising coders and artists, respect them by at least knowing the basics of their crafts!
Bear in mind; this industry is unlike any other I've encountered in my experience, so just because you've managed a project in another career does not mean you'll cut it in games.
So maybe you're over the hill, and maybe you're a pre-pubescent type. Either way you'll need to start someplace. A lot of people have done it in mods, although that community has been badly fragmented in the past few years... Learn tools such as GMax, or scripting languages, dabble in anything you can for experience. A popular option lately has been to work with pre-existing technology. I reccomend looking at garagegames.com, where you can license the Torque engine for your own project, and get great support from other indie developers.
And be tough about it. Speaking on terms of an average, with or without formal education, it will take you 2-4 years of thankless passion to get your foot in the door. And typically working your way into any sort of supervisory role will take as long or much longer afterwards. Don't be a lazy schmuck.
In fact, I have yet to meet a game designer who is a software engineer. Designers tend to spring up from the art or testing departments, rather than programming.
Going back six or seven years, the role of "designer" was carried out by a programmer or artist working on the project. The now common dedicated designer role is a sign of the increasing complexity of games. It requires a lot of time to think through an entire game structure, maintaining consistency and a sense of playability.
Pretty much anybody can come up with a decent game idea. Most people I know in the industry have a wish list of games they'd love to make one day. Anyone can submit a game idea for consideration. Ultimately, though, it does come down to marketing and higher management about which projects get the go-ahead. It is the designer's responsibility to take that game idea and expand on it. There are two crucial elements to this:
- They must explore and think through every possible scenario, action and reaction within the game and be able to rationalise this into a consistent set of rules.
- They must be able to explain the design effectively to other designers, artists, programmers and managers.
Life is an unnecessary pain when either of these are done poorly. If the game isn't thought through properly, you can end up having to redo large sections. For example, if object X is used in room A, and needed again in room C, then make sure that if the player leaves it behind, they can at least go back and reclaim it. Make sure documentation is up-to-date, comprehensive and concise. I've waded through 500+ page design docs, of which less than 50 pages were of any relevance to the development staff.
If you've got a good writing background, strong communication skills and a broad experience and love of games, then it's very likely you could find a entry level game designer position. It's extremely unlikely you'll be designing your own game for several years. It's more probable that you'll be working on level or puzzle designs for other games, so be prepared for this. When approaching games companies for such a position, and with no prior experience in the industry, make sure you have some example game designs. Don't be overly concerned about coming up with a completely unique game - the company will more interested in the attention to detail and how clearly you present your ideas. Alternatively, develop ideas on how an existing game could have been made differently and how this would improve it.
One of the first game designers to make the move to computer game design was Sandy Petersen. He had worked at Chaosium on Call of Cthulhu and teh Glorantha game world, and had a lot of experience running and designing both roleplaying and board games. He really knew what makes a good game, and saw that the IT industry was mainly producing fairly predictable platform games. So he teamed up with some fairly obscure game programmers calling themselves Id, and helped create Doom. After Quake he went to Ensemble Studios.
Even if he wasn't one of the first to make the move, I remember doing an article or interview in the late 80's lamenting the poor state of computer game design.
You sound like you belong in middle management at a big insurance company. After 30 years there, when you realize you never learned anything but how to check your voice mail and bitch at people for not completing something, you will kill yourself by blunt trauma with the corporate pen, after having written your suicide note on a corporate-logo'd legal pad, minutes before.
Lesson: Laziness == middle management.
Learning and Experience == Innovative role within a company.