So you want to be a Game Designer? (Part One)

It’s been a while since I wrote anything, and I’ve been meaning to write something like this since I started the blog.

So you want to be a Game Designer?

I’ve been asked a number of times over the last few months about becoming a Game Designer. So here is my little guide to dipping your toe in to the swimming pool of Game Design and seeing if it’s warm enough to dive in to.

Lesson 1: Do you like games?

I mean games pural – not just one game or one kind of games. Have you played a wide variety of different game types on a variety of different game machines? I ask because you need to expose yourself to as many games as you can. Fortunately we live in a world of Xbox Live and Playstation Network, where it is trivially easy to download demos and try all sorts of games without have to commit $20+ dollars for the benefits of trying skate. or Beautiful Katamari. Websites like Gametrailers.com allow you see actual gameplay footage which is sometimes the next best thing to actually playing the game. Do yourself a favor and play more games – play anything you can get your hands on … and here’s the tricky bit – analyze it. Why is Call of Duty 2 better than Hour of Victory? What is the difference between skate. and Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground? More importantly why do you think the designers/developers made the decisions they did?

Lesson 2: The only way to learn is to do …

Much like with Lesson 1, we live in a time and age where it is very easy to get your hands on the actual software used to make shipped games. Games like Half-Life 2, Warcraft 3 and Unreal Tournament ship with the same tools the company used to make the entire game. With a few simple Google searches it is easy to find some tutorials that will get almost anyone making their own content for those games. Hell, there are a ton of console games that ship with really simple but effective game editors – Tony Hawk, Far Cry Instincts, Stuntman Ignition and Timesplitters - all shipped with tools that allow you to make your own content for the game.

So Lesson 2 is make a level – I don’t care what game it is, or what genre it is in – just make a level. I don’t care if you copy a level from the game itself (as long as you actually make it) – the important thing is to understand how games are put together. Just what does it take to layout an environment in 3D? How do you get the Space Marine to say a witty line every time an alien is killed? What is needed to allow the player to trick all the way between the half-pipe and the taxi?

All these questions were asked by the designers when these games were made – luckily for you, you have access to the tools to realize these things. The designers of the game didn’t always have the same access to those tools – they had to ask for them or get features added so that they could do what they saw only in their mind’s eye. Think about what you wish the tools did, or what you want to do in the game engine. Make a note of those ideas – post them on a forum, or look for ways to make those things happen anyway.

Seriously, if you want to save yourself a $80 thousand dollar course at one of these “faux” Game Design courses that places like Digipen or Full Sail – invest in a decent PC and a copy of Half-Life 2. You will learn more from trying to make levels, from scripting with an actual working game language, and by trying to push the game engine in new directions than listening to some half-arsed academic prattle on for hours and whose only game designs live on the pages of some shitty blog like this one.

A nice side benefit is that having examples of previous level/game work is the easiest way to get into a game company – I always want to see signs that a potential candidate has had the enthusiasm and commitment to actually make something. I’m not really interested in your written game ideas (sorry – but frankly the ideas part of this job is the easiest bit), I’m interested in the bit where you were so excited by your idea you committed to make it in to a reality – even if it didn’t turn out as well as you’d hoped. I want to see in the designers I work with evidence that they have worked within the constraints of a game’s design and/or engine, that they have tried and presumably failed a number of times before they got the result they wanted, and most importantly – they didn’t give up when things got tricky.

Lesson 3: Go to school!

Wha-what? I thought you just bagged on those expensive rip-off Game Design colleges? I did, however a good college education can be the dividing line between your resume making it past the HR department, and your resume making it to the top of the pile. Don’t think that a Game Design course is a magic path to seeing your cyber punk RPG based on the Diary of Anne Frank turn in to reality. Choose a course that will keep you excited and interested in the multiple years you’ll be at college – a good course in writing, or art or psychology are just as useful and able to get your a design job.

I work with a number of people who didn’t go to college and got in to games via testing or intern programs. These are perfectly valid routes to becoming a game designer, however remember we live in an ever-changing world and you may not be a Game Designer forever. Having a degree – just like having a good show reel of work – shows a commitment to bettering yourself. It shows that you could take the X years of college and turn in good work against a strict timetable, that you can listen and communicate effectively, and that you can probably shotgun a can of beer. That pain in the arse degree might just get you in to a cushy job working on Human Interface Design, or persuade Walmart that you are the perfect person to welcome people to their store. Having a degree is better than not having one – and trust me on this – the debt you will accrue will disappear quicker than you think. My degree was the sole reason I got an interview for my first Game Design job (God Bless you Psygnosis!)

Lesson 4: Learn to communicate.

The best lessons I have learnt as a game designer were not the little tricks of the trade like “Keep it simple, stupid” or “Less is more” (though both should be tattooed to the undersides of your eyelids) – but rather the things I learnt about writing and communicating with people.

Always write your idea down – it serves as a chance to be your own critic, and as a place to record the idea in your head before you forget it. It will show you the weaknesses in your idea a lot quicker and a lot sooner than going straight to the game editor or to the artist/coder you are working with. Learn when you are writing to “sketch” your idea out, on a very high level put down your central ideas. For example:

lvl_fort – Red Dead Revolver

• opening - middle of a battle, gatling gun on wall, escape battlefield
• middle - search the ruins for enemies, hear cries from the battle outside, enemies surprise player by appearing from strange places (climb over walls, dropping from holes in roof)
• end - reach gatling gun, turn it on enemies, fight boss

Each one of those comments is an element of your design – these will help you decide what is and isn’t important about your idea. Whether you are working on a level design, or on describing a feature of your game – breaking it down to the fundamental elements is your goal. It will allow you to structure your document effectively so you know what you need to describe, and for the potential audience it will allow them to quickly see what information is relevant to them. A well organized document is half the battle.

The other half is pictures. Recently on Hulk, I received my first bit of praise about some documentation – this was documentation that the Game Director had seen several times before, but the difference this time was that I added a lot of images that visualized the concepts that the text describes. The work I had done previously was 30 pages of headings and text, what I turned in recently was 45 pages of pictures, headings and text. People are visual creatures – especially artists – so communicating with images is a really efficient way of getting someone’s attention. Whenever you can, support your words with pictures – if you have an idea for how something should look or are trying to communicate something that others are having a hard time understanding, find a pad of paper and sketch it. Make friends with a 2D artist (or better than that, learn to draw yourself) and ask them to help you visualize your idea. When I worked on Red Dead Revolver while it was still a Capcom game, our Japanese Game Director would draw very simple storyboards to explain how he saw the gameplay of a level or a feature – it was a very simple and effective way to make sure that everyone understood his vision, especially since he didn’t necessarily have the amount of English he would have needed to communicate it fully to us.

Okay that’s enough for now – It’s probably all a load of balls, but maybe there are a couple of gems tucked away in that lot. At least I have somewhere to send people for advice now if they ask about Game Design. I plan on writing a part two one day – though for the life of me I have no idea what it will be about.

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