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?

Comments

Write up your ideas.

[JohnFluxx]

I'm a worldforge developer (well, thats stretching it a lot, but I develop a game, and use their stuff).
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 :) Dream a little lower people, please. hehe

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.