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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.
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.
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
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.
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.