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So You Want To Be a Game Designer?
Gamespot is running a feature which talks to designers such as CliffyB and Akira Yamaoka on the subject of what it means to be a game designer. From the article: "No one just falls into the position. You claw, kick and scream and push your way into it. Most designers start off as programmers or artists. They understand gameplay systems; they live and breathe games. From my perspective, I was making my own games, programming them, doing all the artwork, the production, level design, and everything because I didn't have anybody else to do it for me. That background helped give me the perspective it takes to pull a product together and have a creative vision for it. Being a designer is about having a creative vision and adhering to it."
seems like some of those people were merely lucked out thanks to their previous hollywood careers.. of course some had done some pretty hard work, but it almost feels like it could turn into one of those fields like "communication".. you do a lot of work, and can't get shit worth of a job.. but i encourage it.. simply because I really need good freakin video games.. they are great works of art, and its a good outlet for their expressive minds.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Exactly the same here.
For the last 15 years theres nothing I wanted more. After hearing all the crap which goes around I decided I'd be better off becoming a tech support guy instead. Start a local based company, goto peoples houses, fixs basic crap, rake in the money, don't lose my wife and kids because I work too much if I ever get either.
May not be my dream but at least I don't end up as some slave who has to sleep in an office chair for 2 hours a day.
I like muppets.
but I play one on the web.
.zip file, not just the one that looks neat.
I've been creating modules for Neverwinter Nights for the last few years and have had far more exposure than I would have thought possible to the world of game design. I've had teams of people working for me, dealt with NDAs and contracts, stayed up way too late debugging, and gone from extremes of giddiness to despair.
It sounds silly, but making games is a ton of work. Most of it isn't pleasant and it requires someone who enjoys creating things for the sake of the creation. The pay is lousy and you'll get hate mail no matter what creative decisions you make. Things will break and people will complain and ask for help. I find myself playing tech support to the world, explaining how you can't overclock your computer on a hot Summer day in Spain, or how you need to extract all the files from a
Still, I've kept it as a hobby for a long while now and don't plan on stopping any time soon. On the plus side, I've gotten some extremely uplifting e-mails from cancer patients, Israeli soldiers, and Peace Corps volunteers talking about how happy my games made them when all seemed bleak. As cliche as it sounds, it's that sort of thing that keeps me motivated.
I thought they just added some textures and models to a someone-elses/IDGames/Valve 3D engine , add in a movie franchise theme
Oddly enough I have a friend who works in game design and it was essentially doing that that helped break him into the field - way back when the original doom first came out he created the AliensTC mod for Doom by himself at home for fun. It had good enough artwork, level design and general atmosphere that it got him noticed in the gaming community. Since then he's gone on to various jobs in game design, including working for Valve on Half Life 2.
The article is right - the best way to get into the field is to just get out there and put in the hard work. If you're good enough and manage to prove yourself you can do well.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I've clearly been around here since your mom was in diapers. He got modded informative, most likely, because game design is even more dog-eat dog than game programming. Getting into game programming is like striving to be the Kraft Services guy in the movie industry while game design is more like striving to be a set designer, casting director or writer in the movie industry.
A lot of the gaming industry is like the business industry. To really get anywhere big, it's mostly about being in the right place at the right time with the right people and having the right contacts (preferably contacts with lots of spare cash).
Talent and hard work are important, but don't get you far without being from the right family or having the right contacts.
As for how competitive the job of programming games are, I can say this much. I had a roomate a decade ago. He was addicted to games, did not go to sleep at night because he could not stop playing. I think one of his games was Warcraft, I don't remember, but I used to hear him at 2am on the phone, giggling as he called up other people playing the game over the network. But the guy also was barely making "C" grades in his classes. I dunno what happened to him, he eventually moved out because he could not tolerate my drinking, and the fact that I banged his sister when she came to visit for a weekend. I guess he should not have ditched her to go play more Warcraft. I was more than happy to show her the bars, among other things.
I kept telling him, it is different liking something as the consumer and liking it as the manufacturer. I love sports cars, but the one summer I spent working in an automotive factory was pure hell.
Anyways, the ones that I think would make cool games are the story tellers. Who knows, maybe an english lit major would make a better game designer than a programmer or math guy.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Want to make games? Learn a skill and come up with a game idea. Big news. Everything else is just self-congratulatory window dressing and delusion.
If more people treated it like a profession, the industry would naturally become more professional.
The best position to be a game designer is a level or map designer an not a programmer.
The map designer request features required to script and art assets to use and is responsible to actual gameplay and has to know to script/programm the game game engine.
Additional team working and organiziation is a must. To be a good game desinger you still have to good programmers and artists available and know what its reasonably makable.
I'd have to say that this is the case with most things in life - you never know where things will take you.
i started my 'official' game industry career (as opposed to my 15 hobby years of programming games starting on the vic20 on up) by participating in an open-source game engine project many years ago as 'user # 3' using the engine...
2 years later suddenly i was hosting & designing the website & forum, 2 years after that i became project lead organizing the community & planning features, roadmaps etc...
which all led to me and my business partner incorporating and launching our game company a little over 2 years ago...and we now have 10 employees, 2 game engines, just finishing a mobile title for a very large publisher and a number of large contracts under our belts going forwards...
all of which came from me donating thousands of hours helping & donating to an open source community and project.
the trick is - if you want to do something like 'becoming a game designer', then go out there and design games - there are hundreds of free / open source engines available and thousands of people looking to make games...organize yourself and the rest will follow.
what's the quote?
'free your mind and your ass will follow'
You can't look at the immediate financial benefit to start - look to the long-term goal and you will reach it...one baby step at a time.
Gekido's Lair
For one, there is a defined path to becoming a neurosurgeon. You can decide, in eighth grade, "I want to become a neurosurgeon/lawyer/police officer/accountant" and, at every year from that point on, anyone relevant who you ask will say "I know what your next step needs to be". The steps generally involve a lot of work, but generally not clawing, kicking, and screaming -- just nose-to-the-grindstone following the path thats been clearly laid out for you.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Remember, unless you're making your own game, you're somebody else's bitch.
I've been a designer in the industry though admittedly for less years than you. I find this a surprising comment to make as part of what seems to be a bit of shit-talking towards designers. In my experience and I think in most good shops, designers are paid to DESIGN i.e. think and make intelligent, rational decisions about how things should work and why (not just art production). This means its usually the designers are the ones who are telling the coders how things should work and its the coder's job to find a way to execute the designer's decisions. Where I work, the designers are definitely favored above the programmers, I'd say to a fault.
Coders do get higher salaries, but if something as simplistic and quantifiable as money was my highest priority, I wouldn't have gotten into this field. I could've been a hedge fund manager and said to you "I'll take the cash, because I like my 911, thank you." There are better reasons to have a job than number of zeroes in the salary.
That said, I'm sure the salary hit would be a real obstacle to people switching to the design side of things. And yet in my experience I've met far more coders with unfulfilled design ambitions than vice versa. The reason? I think good design (like good coding) requires some qualities that just can't be taught and there were probably extant reasons that so-and-so went into coding in the first place.