Ask a Game Designer a Question
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I want this question answered as well. I am quite curious as to what company the OP works for.Radeonx said:
whats the best advice you can give for a recently graduated 3d high poly artist? trying to break into the industry is hard i've heard but any further advice then its just hard and don't give up... (and obviously have passion, good work ethic, and a great portfolio)
For those who are asking who he works for, he works for BioWare. The homepage in his profile links directly to SW:TOR, after all. (That, and I remember seeing him state that in the MM forums. >.>)
Anyway, my questions as a hopefully-someday-I'll-get-to-where-you-are person: how exactly did you break in to your current profession? Were you lucky and knew someone who introduced you to the position? Or did you apply for jobs, and, if so, what did you have in terms of a demo? If you code instead, what types of samples did you send in?
Also, how awesome is the work? Is it fun? Or does it feel like any other job?
Anyway, my questions as a hopefully-someday-I'll-get-to-where-you-are person: how exactly did you break in to your current profession? Were you lucky and knew someone who introduced you to the position? Or did you apply for jobs, and, if so, what did you have in terms of a demo? If you code instead, what types of samples did you send in?
Also, how awesome is the work? Is it fun? Or does it feel like any other job?
What is your education?
I would like to become a game designer and am wondering what degrees you have/need
I would like to become a game designer and am wondering what degrees you have/need
Is being in game design really that awesome?
[sub] Damnit, Lem0nade! Don't let anyone know about your childish dream![/sub]
[sub] Damnit, Lem0nade! Don't let anyone know about your childish dream![/sub]
Could you describe a typical working day? If there is no such thing a typical working day then what tasks fall into your job description and how many hours do you work in day?
And I'm sorry if that is too personal or job interviewish but I get the impression that job descriptions and hours for roles like designer are very different across the games industry.
And I'm sorry if that is too personal or job interviewish but I get the impression that job descriptions and hours for roles like designer are very different across the games industry.
How easy is it to get into the game design business? C
an a person just set up their own company, hire some programmers, write a story and *bam* game, or is it more complicated than that?
an a person just set up their own company, hire some programmers, write a story and *bam* game, or is it more complicated than that?
That's certainly a lot of questions! I'll try to answer them in blocks, starting with the first ten or so. =)
This applies all the more strongly to the story in an RPG, given how much of the game typically revolves around it.
I especially like being able to come back to something a day or too later, as time tends to lend a bit of clarity. It's important to have a little distance from your work so that you can view it objectively. Falling too in love with your own content or your own ideas will ultimately lead to a weaker end result.
First, commercially. I'm extremely anti-piracy and, having seen some of the metrics I've seen, I believe that they really are inflicting some damage on the industry; not necessarily a huge, oh-my-god-somebody-save-us amount, but enough to be noticed. Used game sales are, honestly, putting a more serious hole in our pocket. Telemetry has shown some interesting results. I won't name games, but I've seen some proof that the ratio of people playing certain titles to people that actually paid for the same title (new) is 4:1. That's not a piracy number; that's a used game sales number. The argument "they wouldn't have bought it anyways" is a little less valid when they did. They just didn't buy it in such a way that the actual developer will ever see a dime from it.
I can already here the "OMG yer sapping mah profit margins you really make enough money to all drive Porsches" counter argument coming up, so let me head that off now. The cost of purchasing a game now isn't much different than it was a number of years ago, but the cost of developing has increased dozens of times over and teams frequently reach 200 developers. That's no small amount of overhead. For us to stay in business, we need to make those sales. If we don't, there goes our jobs and our ability to keep putting out games. I love what I do; there is nothing else in the world that I would take over this. I'd really like to keep doing it.
Second, from the viewpoint of games themselves. The industry is still young enough that it's quick to latch onto new concepts, whether they're good (cover shooters) or bad (QTE's in cinematics). There's a lot of shaking down and iteration that still needs to happen. That aside, I'm still not finding any shortage of games to fill my time. While I'm a fan of the nostalgic 8 and 16 bit days, I'm not going to lie: my enjoyment of those games is directly influenced by how I enjoyed them at the time I originally played them, not by how good they are by today's standards.
Design psychology has grown and changed radically in the past ten years, with a strong bent on becoming player-centric. I can't consider that anything but good. Even games that are supposedly hardcore, "learn by dying titles" (ie. Demon's Souls) employ a number of modern methodologies to make the game enjoyable in spite of -- or even because of -- the difficulty.
Is the industry dying? No. Is it in the throes of some serious change? Oh, Hell yes. Welcome to puberty, game industry. The changes, they're a-comin'.
As for your question, it's something I'll try to answer in a broad sense. It's different for every studio, but generally you can expect a lot of the following:
Pre-production
This is the part most relevant to your question. What is the game? What is the general story? What are we trying to accomplish? What's our engine? What's our content and development pipeline? Pre-production is usually a small team of seniors and leads hammering out the "whats" of the project. They establish the vision of the game through constant meetings, discussion, and pitching of ideas and concepts. While decisions are made as a group, there are ultimately one or two people that have the power to make a final call; they're the vision holder(s) for the project.
At the same time, there is often a great deal of prototyping as people try to determine what will actually work, what engine to use, how movement and combat might handle, etc. You start to get some of the "hows" alongside the "whats." Loads of documents, bundles of concept art, and a menagerie of prototyping tech demos are what you end up with here.
Production
This is the point where a team ramps up. You get more members assigned to the team as it goes into production. At this point, in theory, your development pipelines should be in place so that people can make the basic content for the game. Low grade box levels, basic conversations, laying out where combat encounters might occur, etc. At this point, it doesn't really look like a game as much as it does a whole lot of disparate elements and temporary work.
Full Production
Team ramps up further and more people are added. You start getting a lot more content that is closer to complete as more and more functionality, game systems, and tools come online for the development team to work with. Now it resembles a game, but a really buggy, terrible one. That's where iteration starts to come in. Lots of time spent determining what really works and how to make it work well. Lots of rewrites, bug fixes, art changes, etc.
Polish / Death March
This is when the team starts to absorb everybody else in the studio and the content gets polished to be truly release-worthy. Work hours often increase dramatically as people work to get as much content polished and as grand as possible. "It's good enough" is something we don't like to say, so we'll put in a lot of extra time to make sure that we can say "it's as awesome as possible" instead. Sometimes, you just don't have the time or resources though and you'll have to pick your battles or pull your punches. Sad, but unavoidable. We're a business and, much as we love what we do, we still have to ship a "product*" in the end.
* I loathe that term, if only because it sounds so generically business-like to use. I make games, period.
That about cover your question, or were you looking for something more in depth?
Second question, I'm not a texture artist so I can't comment on a lot. Depending on what you add to the player, we may or may not switch models. Sometimes we switch small pieces in and out, other times we switch larger ones. Some changes are cosmetic and "flat" enough that we only need to swap a texture rather than an entire model. It really depends on what you're doing. =)
For instance, equipping a helmet is likely to be a total model swap, albeit a small one. If your character has just acquired a new scar across their eye, it's going to be a texture swap or a texture addition to whatever's currently on the face.
I'm sure some people worry that the influx of the motion-driven casual gamer is going to dilute what games are, but I don't actually see that happening. There are a lot of people that want to play, and almost as many that want to make, the kind of games that let you kick back on your couch, relax, and game like we always have.
For now, I view motion control gaming as an extension, not a replacement, of what gaming is. I, personally, am much more in favor of having a controller in my hand and I can't help but agree with Yahtzee's sentiment that we should be finding ways to make our on-screen avatars react to less input from the player, rather than more. The controller is our interface to the game and, consequently, it's incredibly important to have it react quickly and easily to what we do. Surely you've had moments where you curse the controls in a game for being unresponsive, twitchy, or otherwise feeling out of sync with what you're doing.
If motion controls reach a point where they can give me the rapid response reactions I get from a controller, I'll be more than happy to give them more credit but, for now, I still want to sit down and relax when gaming after a hard day of work.
Well, that took me pretty much all day to answer when I had short bits of time to breathe. I'll try for some more tomorrow. =)
As Heart of Darkness noted, I work for BioWare. With that in mind, let's note that I am not, in any capacity, speaking as a representative of said company. I am speaking as an individual interested in bolstering outside knowledge of the game industry, at least as little as I may be able to.Radeonx said:
To me, the most important step is the same regardless of genre: iteration. Iterate, iterate, iterate. As a good friend once said, paraphrased from memory, "the best we can do is make something not suck on the first try. We have to iterate to actually make it fun." He's right. The first try at anything is, generally speaking, "okay at best." It takes constant iteration and adjustment to make it something really enjoyable.FargoDog said:
This applies all the more strongly to the story in an RPG, given how much of the game typically revolves around it.
Creative process is different for everyone and every studio, especially given how different design roles are across the industry. Personally, I actually like to start with pencil and paper. I sketch out ideas or jot down quick notes related to whatever task I'm tackling, then spend a short time pushing and prodding the ideas to see what forms. As soon as I think I have something worthwhile, I set about prototyping it (for content) or mocking a GUI up (for a tool). Beyond that, it's a matter of iteration and bulletproofing.Nossy said:
I especially like being able to come back to something a day or too later, as time tends to lend a bit of clarity. It's important to have a little distance from your work so that you can view it objectively. Falling too in love with your own content or your own ideas will ultimately lead to a weaker end result.
Hmm...that's honestly a tough question. I have some views that I know won't exactly help to popularize myself, but I'll be brutally honest. I'll tackle your question from two points.Rocket Dog said:
First, commercially. I'm extremely anti-piracy and, having seen some of the metrics I've seen, I believe that they really are inflicting some damage on the industry; not necessarily a huge, oh-my-god-somebody-save-us amount, but enough to be noticed. Used game sales are, honestly, putting a more serious hole in our pocket. Telemetry has shown some interesting results. I won't name games, but I've seen some proof that the ratio of people playing certain titles to people that actually paid for the same title (new) is 4:1. That's not a piracy number; that's a used game sales number. The argument "they wouldn't have bought it anyways" is a little less valid when they did. They just didn't buy it in such a way that the actual developer will ever see a dime from it.
I can already here the "OMG yer sapping mah profit margins you really make enough money to all drive Porsches" counter argument coming up, so let me head that off now. The cost of purchasing a game now isn't much different than it was a number of years ago, but the cost of developing has increased dozens of times over and teams frequently reach 200 developers. That's no small amount of overhead. For us to stay in business, we need to make those sales. If we don't, there goes our jobs and our ability to keep putting out games. I love what I do; there is nothing else in the world that I would take over this. I'd really like to keep doing it.
Second, from the viewpoint of games themselves. The industry is still young enough that it's quick to latch onto new concepts, whether they're good (cover shooters) or bad (QTE's in cinematics). There's a lot of shaking down and iteration that still needs to happen. That aside, I'm still not finding any shortage of games to fill my time. While I'm a fan of the nostalgic 8 and 16 bit days, I'm not going to lie: my enjoyment of those games is directly influenced by how I enjoyed them at the time I originally played them, not by how good they are by today's standards.
Design psychology has grown and changed radically in the past ten years, with a strong bent on becoming player-centric. I can't consider that anything but good. Even games that are supposedly hardcore, "learn by dying titles" (ie. Demon's Souls) employ a number of modern methodologies to make the game enjoyable in spite of -- or even because of -- the difficulty.
Is the industry dying? No. Is it in the throes of some serious change? Oh, Hell yes. Welcome to puberty, game industry. The changes, they're a-comin'.
Hehe, thanks for the kudos. I hope it proves to be a bit educational and dispel some of the WTF-are-we-doing-behind-closed-doors misinformation. =)Fensfield said:
As for your question, it's something I'll try to answer in a broad sense. It's different for every studio, but generally you can expect a lot of the following:
Pre-production
This is the part most relevant to your question. What is the game? What is the general story? What are we trying to accomplish? What's our engine? What's our content and development pipeline? Pre-production is usually a small team of seniors and leads hammering out the "whats" of the project. They establish the vision of the game through constant meetings, discussion, and pitching of ideas and concepts. While decisions are made as a group, there are ultimately one or two people that have the power to make a final call; they're the vision holder(s) for the project.
At the same time, there is often a great deal of prototyping as people try to determine what will actually work, what engine to use, how movement and combat might handle, etc. You start to get some of the "hows" alongside the "whats." Loads of documents, bundles of concept art, and a menagerie of prototyping tech demos are what you end up with here.
Production
This is the point where a team ramps up. You get more members assigned to the team as it goes into production. At this point, in theory, your development pipelines should be in place so that people can make the basic content for the game. Low grade box levels, basic conversations, laying out where combat encounters might occur, etc. At this point, it doesn't really look like a game as much as it does a whole lot of disparate elements and temporary work.
Full Production
Team ramps up further and more people are added. You start getting a lot more content that is closer to complete as more and more functionality, game systems, and tools come online for the development team to work with. Now it resembles a game, but a really buggy, terrible one. That's where iteration starts to come in. Lots of time spent determining what really works and how to make it work well. Lots of rewrites, bug fixes, art changes, etc.
Polish / Death March
This is when the team starts to absorb everybody else in the studio and the content gets polished to be truly release-worthy. Work hours often increase dramatically as people work to get as much content polished and as grand as possible. "It's good enough" is something we don't like to say, so we'll put in a lot of extra time to make sure that we can say "it's as awesome as possible" instead. Sometimes, you just don't have the time or resources though and you'll have to pick your battles or pull your punches. Sad, but unavoidable. We're a business and, much as we love what we do, we still have to ship a "product*" in the end.
* I loathe that term, if only because it sounds so generically business-like to use. I make games, period.
That about cover your question, or were you looking for something more in depth?
You know, I honestly can't answer that. I know what it is and I truly hope to be able to take a stab at it one day but I have to keep it under wraps. Anything I say is the property of my employers, after all. ^_^ Let's just say that I'm a big fan of co-op and roleplaying games and leave it at that.nuba km said:
First, yes, that drives me a little crazy. QA is all about testing the same thirty square feet of a game over and over and over and over until you can do it from your grave, which is probably where the experience will put you. We aren't "playing games." We're working with incomplete software. Anything and everything, from the tap of the wrong key combination to the phases of the moon could result in an explosion of error messages and crashes.WanderFreak said:
Second question, I'm not a texture artist so I can't comment on a lot. Depending on what you add to the player, we may or may not switch models. Sometimes we switch small pieces in and out, other times we switch larger ones. Some changes are cosmetic and "flat" enough that we only need to swap a texture rather than an entire model. It really depends on what you're doing. =)
For instance, equipping a helmet is likely to be a total model swap, albeit a small one. If your character has just acquired a new scar across their eye, it's going to be a texture swap or a texture addition to whatever's currently on the face.
I do a lot of scripting with internal languages, which usually involves learning something new for most projects. AuroraScript, JadeScript, Kismet, etc. I've worked with a lot and they're all specific to their own engine. As far as programming goes, I learn towards Visual C# because it can make some pretty solid tools that make my job easier. ^_^GamesB2 said:
My vote is on the latter, if only because violence sells and, as we all know, games are just murder simulators.TomCorf said:
I'm going to go with "neither" as my answer, and here's why. The current trend isn't going to deliver us to the next stage of gaming, but it's not a step in the wrong direction either. It's experimental and that's something we need right now. What it is accomplishing is the increasing of the gamer pool. More and more people that didn't used to play any games, or wrote them off as something "meant for kids," are now getting involved in gaming.tlozoot said:
I'm sure some people worry that the influx of the motion-driven casual gamer is going to dilute what games are, but I don't actually see that happening. There are a lot of people that want to play, and almost as many that want to make, the kind of games that let you kick back on your couch, relax, and game like we always have.
For now, I view motion control gaming as an extension, not a replacement, of what gaming is. I, personally, am much more in favor of having a controller in my hand and I can't help but agree with Yahtzee's sentiment that we should be finding ways to make our on-screen avatars react to less input from the player, rather than more. The controller is our interface to the game and, consequently, it's incredibly important to have it react quickly and easily to what we do. Surely you've had moments where you curse the controls in a game for being unresponsive, twitchy, or otherwise feeling out of sync with what you're doing.
If motion controls reach a point where they can give me the rapid response reactions I get from a controller, I'll be more than happy to give them more credit but, for now, I still want to sit down and relax when gaming after a hard day of work.
Well, that took me pretty much all day to answer when I had short bits of time to breathe. I'll try for some more tomorrow. =)
What are the exact roles of a developer?RollForInitiative said:
Do you take pride in the games you make, and further more offer feedback to the lead designer/developer?
Who is actually in charge of concepts and ideas behind a game, be they the gameplay mechanics or actual story/lore?
(If you only want to answer one, please make it the last =] maybe a list of people and their duties if its not too much to request)
By the way, thanks for this. Truth be told I often blame a bad game on the developers and I've no real comprehension of who to give credit/blame to often times, not to mention the difficulty of the job.
As someone interested in being involved with the creation of storyline in games and the characters that inhabit it, I would like to know how it works for Bioware.
Do you have specific 'storyline writer(s)' whose job is mainly to write, revise, and help integrate the storyline during the development process? Or does this job usually fall to the game designers as a whole.
And if it is the latter, does this mean that all storyline decisions (plot, what the characters are like, etc) are made by committee/everyone voting on what they want to happen and the most votes win? Or perhaps is the work divided up among the designers with each working on something different (some deal with enemies, some deal with the heroes and their motivations, another might fiddle with the fictional history of the setting), but having a Lead Designer presiding over them whose job is to maintain everything and make sure it all fits together while still being interesting?
How much say do the non-designers/writers get in the focus and direction of the story/characters?
Do you have specific 'storyline writer(s)' whose job is mainly to write, revise, and help integrate the storyline during the development process? Or does this job usually fall to the game designers as a whole.
And if it is the latter, does this mean that all storyline decisions (plot, what the characters are like, etc) are made by committee/everyone voting on what they want to happen and the most votes win? Or perhaps is the work divided up among the designers with each working on something different (some deal with enemies, some deal with the heroes and their motivations, another might fiddle with the fictional history of the setting), but having a Lead Designer presiding over them whose job is to maintain everything and make sure it all fits together while still being interesting?
How much say do the non-designers/writers get in the focus and direction of the story/characters?
(Sees you work for BioWare) You just got awesome in my eyes haha
But I'll just ask what a few others have, what kind of things are developers looking for? Is there some degree I should be aware of if I want to... say, work in animation/character design? Or do they focus more on what you can actually do?
Also, just out of blatant curiosity, how much money do you make a year?
But I'll just ask what a few others have, what kind of things are developers looking for? Is there some degree I should be aware of if I want to... say, work in animation/character design? Or do they focus more on what you can actually do?
Also, just out of blatant curiosity, how much money do you make a year?