Careers For Supervising Game Designers? 38
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?
gamers and architects (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:gamers and architects (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:gamers and architects (Score:1, Troll)
So what your're saying is: fuck the people who do the work, I should get the money they earned. This is exactly why the movie and music "industry sucks so bad in so many ways. This is why the US and various other countries are so screwed up these days. No one wants to work, so they try to take advantage of those who do, and if a hard working person tries to compete with their racket, they take that hard working person down.
This situation cannot continue forever. Eventually most of the workers will see no
Re:gamers and architects (Score:5, Insightful)
Carefully reread the parent post. Mink is clearly saying "idea men"--apparently people who don't do any work and have no skills whatsoever--not only get the money, but they deserve it and the cause works to be created. Apparently, "The people who actually do the art are the suckers who come a dime a dozen." Yeah right. It doesn't work that way.
I worked in a place where the management had that attitude. Eventually all the good workers got pissed off and left. The place went out of business. You can lie, cheat, steal, and treat people like shit and it may get you further ahead in the short term, but after a while you'll end up sleeping with the fishes.
It creates a huge problem in the long term when everyone is looking for easy money or the next scam and think they deserve it. It's not based on reality. Goods and services come from people working to create those goods and services.
Think about the dot coms. They said "we'll put up this website, it'll get lots of hits, and we'll make lots of money." Investers said "the dot com will put up a website and make lots of money." Very few of them ever considered the fact that the company needed to produce anything of value before they could make money. Then investors started realizing this, so they pulled out of the market, and the bust happened.
Re:gamers and architects (Score:1)
In order to get money to develop an entertainment product, let's say a record, you must first prove you can sell it. Why? Because there are a million bands just like you. It's not the music that sells, it's the idea and image that sells. You can go see shitty versions of Matchbox 20 at your local bar everywhere in America. It's
Re:gamers and architects (Score:2)
Re:gamers and architects (Score:4, Funny)
Just like Romero.
Re:gamers and architects (Score:2)
Nope, sorry (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
software engineering (Score:1, Informative)
Much less than 90% (Score:3, Insightful)
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 c
Write up your ideas. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
It is possible (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
But generally a supervisor will get the job after he has done some programming or other task. You have to work your way up.
what I've seen (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:what I've seen (Score:1)
Then make a demo and use that to get industry interest (or realise that you're all crappy game makers or realise that by getting a few friends and making the game you're already in the 'industry')
Learn (Score:3, Insightful)
It is possible... (Score:5, Insightful)
(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.
Re:It is possible... (Score:2)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Skills/Experience (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Michel Ancel (Score:2)
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).
It's already being done (Score:3, Funny)
Lead criticiser (Score:1)
How it is . . . (Score:1, Insightful)
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 repr
Re: (Score:1)
A geek but not a programmer? (Score:1)
pointy haired boss (Score:1)
Prototyping made easy... (Score:1)
Good general game experience (Score:2)