Slashdot Mirror
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!
---
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'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
:)
:)
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.
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.
---
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.
;)
:)
;)
(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
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.
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.