Avoid an Identity Crisis as a Technical Designer

[Music] thank you we are here to set the record straight As technical designers on what this role is all about too many people still stutter when talking about what a tech designer is supposed to do how to manage one let alone writing an accurate job description when hiring so in True Tech design fashion instead of taking this endeavor on by myself I've called and assembled my Avengers of tech design whom I've had the benefit of either studying with or working alongside of I consider them not only dear friends but role models and mentors together we combined for just shy of uh centuries worth of experience in the industry performing this role across many different projects and Studios to hopefully give you the most holistic view possible

welcome to avoiding an identity crisis as a technical designer on this panel we're going to get into it and lay a firm foundation on what a tech designer is we're going to share what a typical day tends to look like we'll then carve clear lines in the sand on how this road differs from the other design families we'll talk about whether um we'll also talk about what it means to generalize and how that leads to being as effective as we can in this role and also contrast that with specializing which is sometimes also necessary we'll point out some of the common pitfalls that tends to arise in this role and how to avoid those and um finally we'll wrap up with advice on how you can get into growing or even nurture this role at your studio I'll invite you to jump in on the chat uh say what you currently do and mention

what you hope to walk away with from this panel uh a little bit about me I'm John Diaz a technical designer at EA on the frostbite engine which Powers some of our franchises like Need for Speed Madden FIFA Battlefield show of hands or even in the chat of who has seen the latest battlefield trailer and there I do all the usual things in tandem with engineering enhancing workflows designing that facing features providing General support to our devs be it in the form of like documentation examples and tutorials I've been at this since I graduated from foso in 2006 uh just shortly after Rusty and Anne I thought I was going to break in and be a gameplay or tools programmer turns out my first gig actually came in the form of a game designer at Midway Austin scripting content on unreal 3 alongside our then technical designer

Rusty and honestly I attached myself to him and modeled what he did enough that eventually he gave me a chance to took me under his wing to get my first taste of doing Tech design and since then I've never looked back despite what my role officially said at rockstar I moved into more of a player facing role scripting content and missions uh in San Diego so that's where Allen was actually a prominent voice on the technical portion of my interview Gauntlet so I worked alongside him there and Alicia on Red Dead Redemption one Undead Nightmare onto GTA 5 and uh about a year or so on Red Dead 2. after that I ventured over the Border got in at WB Games Montreal to do AI systems and that's where I met uh the PowerHouse Jerome parent and worked a little bit on Gotham Knights and got my first taste of unreal four eventually Amazon enticing

me to come over into the world of engine developments to be get back into my roots into dead facing development as a tutorials technical designer showing the world how to use lumber yard and which funny enough made me a prominent candidate for the frostbite ux team over at EA little fun fact about me is I produce a Game Dev podcast that is focuses on sharing our stories and experiences as game devs to hopefully leave the industry a little bit better than when we came into it with all of that said I'm going to get out the way for the real stars of this panel so I'll turn it over to our Bruce Banner AKA Alan Blaine hey John thanks uh Hey everybody my name is Alan Blaine I am a staff technical designer at Bungie where I've been for the last five years and I uh helped build activity and pursuit design tool sets um currently I'm the team lead of a

technical design team called Frameworks and rituals where we have two roles we Define in the rules and best practices for all the various uh kinds of content we build on Destiny and help build tools to support those rules um so that uh when people build new strikes they're consistent with old strikes um and they work the same way second we actually maintain and enhance the uh live game Evergreen ritual gameplay things like uh adding nightfalls Crucible Gambit um so I've been designing and building and shipping games for 23 years um and I have design credits on every PlayStation every Xbox console which is kind of interesting I actually got into uh Tech design in college I was working on a quake total conversion as one of my projects and back in those days the only way to get new models into the game for enemies and guns was to uh you had to have an SGI machine which I think at the time cost fifteen to twenty thousand dollars uh it

luckily put out the the source code for their uh export tools so I took that source code and actually built 3D Studio Max and LightWave exporters for models so that people could add new guns and new uh new enemies to the game and I believe those were the first tools put out publicly to do that um with anything beyond SGI um anyway that was a long time ago and I've been doing Tech design uh on just about every project ever since uh uh so yeah I'll hand it off to Alicia hi my name is Alicia Thayer and I am a lead technical designer at Crystal Dynamics um I've been at Crystal for almost nine years now which is kind of crazy uh and I've been in the industry for about 12. I worked with like John said Allen and John at Rockstar previously on Red Dead Redemption and Max fan three um currently I'm working on uh r d at Crystal Dynamics I can't really say much about what I'm talking about but previously I worked on the Tomb Raider reboot games uh and Lara Croft in the temple of Osiris which is very near and dear to my heart um as for how I got here I kind of face

planted into technical design I took a very academically oriented path um and the reason for that was because I started really early on my path I I wanted to get into games uh God probably down starting at like 10 11 12 somewhere in there because I remember having this profound moment where I realized that people make games and I can be one of them uh so I wanted to go to school for it um I there wasn't there weren't any programs that were near me that uh really you know did video game design yet so I kind of did like a special special undergraduate graduate program at California State University Chico and it was it was pretty crazy towards the end I finished my thesis on a Monday I had a job at Rockstar on a Friday Rockstar was one of the many companies that I applied to I got a job as I think is a technically a content creator it ended up being more of a tech design role but I didn't even know what a tech designer was at the time and uh yeah I worked as a scripter there for a while and then ended up making it up to Crystal where

you know I I am now a elite Tech designer and I'm trying to get a tech design Department established so I'm gonna pass the word again hello I'm Ann children I am a senior technical designer and a project design architect at volition I've been at Volusia for about 11 years now I've been in the industry for about 15 years um have done everything from missions design system design open world design and about six or seven years ago Rusty had pulled me over to help work on creating our own visual scripting system for our editor and I have been in Tech design ever since um and I will just pass it over to Jerome hi uh I'm Jerome Barrow I'm currently working on Gotham Knights as an advanced technical level designer at WB Games Montreal where I've been for about five

years now um I've been in industry for about 14 years the first six of which have been in QA so I didn't take an academic path into the industry but I still more or less accidentally became a tech designer after working at EA I worked at a small Indie studio and helped their ship ship their first game and after that we started using Unreal four and I was able to kind of pick it up and that gave me the opportunity to switch over to the dev side and one day my boss came to me because he needed to renew my contract and he didn't know what title to put on it because he wasn't sure what I did and I had heard that technical designer was a thing so that's actually how I became one and last but not least Rusty hi my name is Rusty simsad I'm the lead technical designer at Arcane Austin um we are working on something that I can't talk about yet but I can say that what I'm doing there now is kind of trying to start or have started a technical design uh group there um one of two technical designers there so that's exciting now um and my kind of path in the industry

was uh as John mentioned uh went to full sale graduated in 06 and started at Midway Austin where I got to work alongside a whole group of wholesale alumni including John and got to find out um about the technical design role because I didn't even know about it prior to that similar to John thought I would be a programmer got into Mission design but then at Midway quickly transitioned into technical design and fortunately have been able to do that in some capacity ever since including a lot of time alongside and at volition building a technical Design Group there and doing a lot of iteration on our tools and pipelines there and so just trying to bring all of that kind of process and mentality uh forward into whatever team I'm working with so that's a bit about me thanks Rusty so let's start out by defining what this role is I think we've all agonized overwriting the best job description so hiring in hiring for this role and uh the best way I like to convey it I like to compare it to if you take a

classic game now like Team Fortress 2 and you ride that spectrum of taking a tank heavy where we're at the Forefront trailblazing and taking damage and dealing damage or ride that onto the other end of the spectrum on the support meta class where we're regioning designers health and helping boost them to new capabilities on the roll and I can only speculate on the types of games that come out of volition that your designers are well equipped with some sweet tools developed in tandem with tech designers as the tech designer now project architect how do you define what a tech designer is uh the short and sweet version that I use to describe a tech designer is our job is to get as close to the make game Button as possible um ultimately our job is to make it as easy as possible to integrate so that

people have more time to iterate on the content that goes into the game so our primary customers are designers but we also you know keep all content creators in mind when we do stuff and essentially we just want to spend as much time as possible you know making games fun and less time struggling trying to get what's in our head into the game and it comes down to who's your end user you know as a game designer your end user is the player as a tech designer your end user is the content creator and so that's what our job is to you know design for the content creators whether it be new tools adjusting workflows and pipelines anything that can make it so that they are not using their brain space just struggling to get something into the game but just making it as fun as possible and you know making the game as

the best that it can be I know Rusty and I used to always talk about this when we worked together so let's see what are your ideas on it yeah I mean I think that the the point that you made about focusing on on sort of like your the tech designers customer so to speak is the uh is the content developer I'm just like that's kind of the end user that we're focused on um and once you kind of know that and have established that in your in your mindset as a technical designer I think it really helps inform um just kind of how you approach problems and the kind of things you choose to prioritize so as you said like focusing on iteration and support you know there's been lots of talks in the past at GDC and research on you know the the more iteration that goes into a game you know the better the resulting player experience um I've always liked to say like they're you know good ideas on paper become great ideas through iteration and so as a technical designer my goal is to try to support and encourage as many

iterations as possible on that content so that can take the form of trying to reduce the number of steps to getting say a feature in or getting a piece of content into the game uh so that way instead of spending maybe a week doing that you can spend two days getting in and have those three days to iterate on and really kind of tweak it to what a designer wants it to be for the player experience um as you said kind of just thinking about that brain capacity like the cognitive load that is part of a given workflow whether that's the number of steps I have to remember documentation anything that Tech design can do to bring that cognitive load down means that that's more brain space for the designer to not only have hopefully the time to focus on the iteration but also just to think about what they want to do what they want to change how they want to improve it and another thing that always has to I think be kind of like a guiding principle for Tech design is to recognize that in most engines there are multiple ways to do a given thing and so we have to think about the path of least resistance and that's part of the cognitive load which is saying okay

which is the the path of least resistance to getting this thing implemented that's the thing we need to focus on not make sure that we support three or four ways to do it and they all work just as well we should prior prioritize and make sure that there's there's one way that's like the best way and sort of the natural way that people want to do it and uh the last thing is actually something I picked up from another technical designer Evan while working at volition which is the the idea of the local maximum versus global maximum and Tech design is in the prime spot to always be thinking about how do we reach that Global maximum so if we're taking a feature of the game a feature of the engine or the tool set don't just think about like how do we make this a little bit better but be willing to take a step back and say what if we rethink how we even do this workflow could we achieve something much higher as that Global maximum if we do that so that's kind of what I think of a tech design and sort of those guiding principles that help you uh kind of frame everything that you're going to be doing thanks for that

my day is very rarely what I Envision it will be say for what's actually on my calendar I feel like I often get the rug pulled out from underneath me yet we always make advances towards moving the needle forward I need to know is it just me Jerome I'm curious how your typical day tends to go especially now that we're working from home I remember early on on the WB Dev floor if I saw you at your desk before like 4 P.M that evening you know that was a rare sight now that I got the knights is heading is deep in production and got a current date of 2022 I wonder how that's changed yeah um I think it can vary greatly depending on what stage of production you're at um it can go from much more proactive earlier on to much more reactive later uh right now the only thing that's typical about my day is that usually by like 10 30 a.m my day looks very different than I thought it would look like when I sat down at my desk at eight

um I think that's a pattern you'll hear from most tech designers um it's mainly a support rule so that's normal and for me and probably for most tech designers that's what keeps the job interesting and fun every day is different but it can be a challenge uh in pre-production it can be more about like 30 kind of unscheduled support and 70 time spent uh prototyping new features mechanics uh helping others with their prototyping helping with the design of kind of larger scope tools and kind of higher level problems or content production pipelines uh like you know your game needs a mission system well what are the components that go into making a mission from from the tech point of view that someone needs to design that um Tech designers kind of live in between all the other departments uh so we usually inherit a lot of tasks that touch everything and and that don't have a very clear owner so there's usually

lots of uh talking to lots of different people to gather information that's maybe something that I didn't expect when I first started this role is just the sheer amount of talking to people and kind of information gathering that you need to do an example of that is you know during pre-production I spent a lot of time working with tech art and all the other departments to create a data validation system where we can you know write and run scripts to automatically check for you know errors is when people are trying to submit stuff and that required talking to basically everyone on the team and asking okay for your type of content what kind of checks you you want to run uh that that's usually a task that kind of ends up in the tech design uh you know pool and then that split gradually turns into more of a 70 unscheduled support and 30 plan tasks when you go over to production and post-production by that point a lot of the game systems and features are up and running chances are you've had your hands in a lot of them in some ways so you automatically become kind of the

point of contact for that feature or that part of the game and so late late in production it's a lot of time fixing bugs helping other fix bugs and just generally kind of unblocking people as fast as you can and keeping keeping the wheels of that production train you know well greased um but at least I'm only in one stage of production at a time uh if you're working on a live game like Destiny you're you've got all of those stages at the same time right Alan yeah so I mean it really is like my day sounds a lot like yours except that uh at any given time we've got a live release over here that needs bug fixes we've got the next patch we're working on uh we've got the next seasonal release that's closing down production and trying to ship uh we got the seasonal release after that that is in the middle of production we've got the seasonal release after that which is in content validation trying to figure out whether all the design ideas are technically feasible and then on top of that we've got the yearly release that's

going to be coming out at some point in the future that has its own production cycle um and slamming all those together is a really complex task so we lean heavily on our producers obviously but to try to fit all of those dates and all those priorities together is really complicated um you know Destiny's been live in some form for uh almost seven years now uh and it was in production and pre-production for years before that so there's a huge amount of uh uh of normal technical debt built up and that's a lot of what my team does is trying to go through and mine all that technical debt and fix it all up and one of the interesting things we do is uh oftentimes if we if we change a workflow to make it more stable to make it uh better for the players or better for the developers uh we don't actually have time in any one of those releases to go back through and fix all of the to fix all the content that's live so we'll put the workflow out do a little content fix up for uh One release and then slowly roll new content fix up so that uh

designers have enough time to uh make those content fix ups and QA has enough time to test them and that's a huge uh you know burden in of itself just trying to go back through and fix all of the old content that lives in the game um yeah it's a it's very complicated um well said guys I love seeing the spectrum of what a day looks like in production and on a live Beast like destiny I've dabbled all over this amazing chart I feel like I've done system design and I always feel like it it can easily get kind of muddled up um and there's a there's you know you paper design a feature you work with Engineers to get it built you Shepherd it out you roll it out uh teach designers how it should work and being mindful to abstract as much technical details as possible Alicia it's been a while but at Rockstar

you're responsible for implementing a fair monarchy open World Systems and encounters and I think you even had to fix your title at Crystal uh I think this is a strong word but I think I am one of the first technical designers in name at Crystal um we have a few uh a few now so that's pretty cool I think we are up to like five or six which is really exciting um yeah so uh what I wanted like to talk about is kind of the difference between a technical design and system design right um because these these two things are often used even in my studio I I mean I can think of recent discussions that I've had where people uh people get the two confused and I think that there are two big aggravators to that um one is that uh the wording's confusing right people often confuse a technical designer with a technically leaning designer and those are very very different things which we'll get into in a minute um the other one is is that sometimes you see technical designers uh kind of moonlight assistant designers on projects um because they tend to have generalist backgrounds but you don't often see the inverse for example you

don't see a system designer tend to really put a lot of effort into workflows or content authoring patterns right so When I Was preparing for this question I started to do some uh reminiscing and thinking about uh my previous interviews of trying to interview technical designers I even talked to my peers um and uh some commonalities bubbled up right uh uh from like their their dated days what they consider their jobs to be um the the service that they provide to their team and so I made this Miro board which we have on the slide right now I've showed it around to some people and it seems to be really useful uh in helping not only technical designers themselves understand uh how to how to communicate what they do but other designers understand like really the role of that person on their team the thing that I'm most excited about with this this graphic is that it has uh on my team at least really cleared up the role for my juniors um you know I have some Juniors that think that they're interested in like hey I think I want to be a technical designer right um and I can show them now this graphic and go like well this is what this job means this is this what you want they go oh wow yeah okay that

makes a ton of sense that's great um so I want to highlight some things on this board that just kind of clear up the the difference between a tech designer and assistant designer and kind of what we do right the the biggest thing that I think is important to highlight is we are a liaison between design and Engineering but we are an advocate first and foremost for design right so that's that's our client that's our team uh that's those are the people that we represent um we often do a lot of uh investigation into good content authoring patterns for our team um and we Advocate those to our team we make sure that we educate our team on those things and and we try to hold them up to a Content authoring kind of bar Quality Bar um so that we're we're all making kind of the same stable content uh we work a lot on early game prototypes I mentioned the generalist thing earlier uh that tends to be because we we have generous backgrounds we have a knowledge of a lot of the the production pipeline we can kind of do a lot of things uh at least at a basic quality

we uh at least I have in uh in recent history contributed a lot to tools and workflow improvements on my team I know certainly Anne has uh and when used properly a technical designer like they augment a team right um and a phrase that Rusty coined during prepping for this talk was force multiplayer which I love so much that I have used just constantly at Crystal um since starting you know like the the preps for this talk I think they're probably sick of being actually uh using it uh but I love that it's a it's a really good really succinct way of of communicating you know what we do for our team and the role that we serve on our team uh anyway so uh the last thing that I wanted to bring up was that since Tech designers are often generalists they do hop around task wise right um but they do even at least they specialize right so that makes that makes the problem even more confusing because you might have a technical designer that specializes in systems so I know Ann has a lot more to say about this so I want to go over and hand it to uh handed her

thank you I love this board so much and um I'm definitely using it myself over at my studio because you know with specifically Tech design and systems the easiest way to describe it is that you know a systems designer designs the system and a tech designer basically acts like doctor strange and has to try and envision as many different possibilities that that system can be used in the future of the project or of the entire franchise and needs to make sure that the system is architected in such a way that we're not going to limit designers in the future from expanding on that system but like you said a lot of it is more of the technically leaning or as I say technically oriented designers I get a lot of um questions it's like well this person's very good at scripting should they be a

tech designer or this person's very good at prototyping should they be a tech designer and this is where I pull out this graphic because it's very easy to point and be like yes this is one part of what we do but where are they on all the other parts and it is really important to realize that we do have all these other parts that we do we may not be visible um because our job is kind of to be in the background and you don't really want to be super visible unless you're training somebody or bringing something new in but um I do think that is one of the big things is like you know there is so much and it is so wide-reaching and yeah I I absolutely love this graphic because it explains it perfectly well said Alicia and Anne yeah this graph is money and I love that doctor strange analogy right I like to imagine myself as a sorcerer but it'd be so cool

to have all those kind of parallel dimensions and being able to kind of see ahead to be like this is the one that we want to go down right and so there's going to tell my team to start calling me Doctor Strange yes absolutely so what has always attracted me to this role and I'm sure many of you out there is the opportunity to kind of get your hands in all the different parts and see how things work and go behind the scenes on them right there's constantly new systems applications sdks things like that uh recently like I've never had a chance to really set up a character from scratch before right and so now I'm deep in the Weeds on the horrible handshake that happens between animation and physics and dealing with like so how far we want to data Define our input handling and things like this um so I asked myself is this the best way to kind of take on the role right

Are we more effective as generous generalists or should I specialize we joke but we actually see in a few different roles pop up while we were preparing for this right we saw technical audio designer technical narrative designer I had never seen tutorials technical designer before and and I ended up in that role um Rusty I've been waiting a long time to confess this to you and now I'm going to take this advantage to do it but I blame you because again you were the first technical designer I worked with and I modeled myself after you were like all right whatever Rusty is going in and I saw you hands in on everything never shying away from opportunity to learn something from the ground up and wrestle with it so what do you think about the spectrum of like generalizing versus specializing being effective in this role and what are some examples well first off thanks that's very nice for you to say that um yeah I think so it's kind of interesting right like inherently technical designers generally are going

to be fit into that category of glorified generalist because the generalist nature helps inform so many of the uh discussions that we need to be a part of that we get pulled into and uh we'll even help you know kind of inform your thought process on how something might need to be put together if you're looking to solve a new workflow or a new pipeline uh problem for for a Content Dev or for a group um but it can also be a vacuum right so we have to be careful I think a part of the the glorified generalist question is that it's part of the role but you have to make sure that it doesn't become the role and that will somewhat change over time as well because I think a good kind of litmus test for technical design as it relates to the glorified journalist question is um and Alicia mentioned this earlier is that kind of idea of being a force multiple higher so glorified generalists can do many things and that's great you know jack of all trades kind of thing but uh if the work you're doing doesn't

necessarily fit into that kind of force multiplier idea then maybe it's worth evaluating is this is that that thing that you're doing right now the highest priority thing that you could be working on as a technical designer and so I think early on being a glorified generalist is kind of just part of it a technical designer as you gain more experience and more perspective and can really start to key into how to be a force multiplier in that role that's when you can sort of also use that generalist nature to help inform like I was saying but kind of start to be a little bit more focused on what you're investing your time in and what you're prioritizing just to help support the team make sure that you're delivering the best thing you can to support the largest number of people um the other thing of course and and uh Jerome mentioned this earlier is that technical design obviously will shift a little bit based on the phase of the project so sometimes you need to be a glorified generalist because that's the time of the project and later you'll need to really lean into that uh hyper Focus kind of force multiplier mentality so I can give one example

um during my time abolition that I felt like was a kind of a good use case or case example of this which is when we were working on the Agents of Mayhem project the VFX team we were working with as Ann mentioned visual scripting that was new to the whole team um and we also had a very robust prefab system and so they had reached out to technical design to say hey we need to implement beams you know ribbon particles um how are we going to script this and and how should we script this and so of course that was like the light bulb moment of like hey we need to make sure this is highly reusable for you so that you know the VFX artist who we had excellent VFX team but they were relatively small for how many VFX we had in the project so I needed to start thinking about that like they need to have quick iteration they need to not have a high cognitive load for this type of workflow they used to be able to plug and play as much as possible but as soon as you start thinking about that you start to realize well beams are you know at the request point it was purely a ribbon particle but there's a lot you can do with that so we started

opening that up to like hey this would just be a great tool in the toolbox that designers could use for maybe content gating or helping to draw a literal line between you know connected pieces of content like a shield generator and the thing that it's shielding instead of it being abstract we could just literally point the player right to it and do it in a very visually compelling way so we started to bake that all into the process the workflow is built to be able to be used by any any content group it was prefab for high reusability with hierarchy so that we could say hey you've got different variations on this so I am not a VFX artist but being a generalist allowed me to say hey I understand the workflow I understand what you're wanting to be able to achieve visually even if I could never do that myself I can support that and of course that meant working directly with engineering to make sure that we had exposed the the things from the particle system that we needed to to be able to do all this in script so that's an example where it was one request VFX based that sort of snowballed into in a

very positive way a full kind of feature of the game that ended up being used in a lot of different ways for everything from gameplay to purely visual elements um so at least I think you had some things to add to this thank you uh yeah so I think it's actually really good to be a generalist um it makes for a more flexible team member um uh it's a generalists kind of have the potential for to advocate for other teams right on pretty much any project because they they understand uh kind of every bit about everyone's workflows and what they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis that's actually why they're really good about prototyping right it's really good to have someone with that kind of background uh for your early game prototypes exploring new workflows and new game features I personally have a generous background and it's helped me be a more versatile functional collaborator on my team uh a few examples of that on I'll give Max Payne three as an example so back on Max Payne free uh I I helped work on most of the game but like in particular the the really

cool slow motion sequences right um where Max kind of like jumps and uh uh you know uh does a little slow motion shooting that sort of thing those are really really complicated uh sequences right and so uh people from all sorts of disciplines needed to jump in on those dog pile I needed you know we had the animation we had the effects guys we had the audio guys uh design everyone and so what I ended up doing is I ended up creating these little like these little widgets these little workflow enhancers that would allow them to kind of scrub the sequence backwards and forwards um because you know like let's use uh there was one in a police station right so max jumps onto a little like cart thing he's rolling uh and these guys repel into the uh into the room they break through Windows right so there's Windows breaking there's all sorts of stuff happening uh all at once and it's really a drag on a developer to have to play that uh front to back just to get like one little edit in so the the widgets really really helped Temple of Osiris I did all the boss fights um and so we were a really small lean team I ended up doing a lot of the like

animation modeling skinning uh effects early sound stuff um not the really crafty things like that to definitely go to my experts but since we were kind of all tapped out uh the fact that I could jump in and and do those things uh the really easy versions that those tasks meant that my my teammates could focus on the things that really required their attention uh not only that though it helped us Jam right like we uh we had a Common Language we ripped off of each other and working together was was really smooth and uh and really productive yeah Alicia I actually think that being a generalist is really good I think it actually might be necessary uh for this job uh I actually prefer to think of myself as a hybrid not a generalist even my first job in the industry was game designer slash engineer um I've had like on the Warriors I actually got a tech art Credit in addition to Tech design uh just because I helped out with a lot of the Collision mesh generation and some uh some of the Sprite uh generation for smashed windows on the cars um my personal process really is to like

do a deep Dives on things and really understand uh the guts of the task to I understand the pain points that I can build the workflows to make uh to make Mission designers jobs easier to whomever uh like I like building the first version of a thing and really understanding um back on Red Dead when we started the Rockstar engine uh basically doesn't have any of the game Concept in the engine at all it just says Hey the player is ready to spawn and then it's all scripts from there on out uh so when we started there was no game there was no skeleton for the game so uh one of my tasks was actually building the skeleton for the game what is a mission build a skeleton for Mission launching you know put the the spot in the world have the companion there but like actually what is the mission does it have checkpoints does it have phases uh how do you spawn the actors and the thing how do you spawn all the props uh so now then I'm building tools in Maya to actually generate all the different things in there and then get it in the game but you know Red Dead open world is a huge

game so we're talking random events mini games towns road maps uh treasure chests all those things I roll in to build the skeleton build the very first version of that thing then I can start building the API out like what are the other designers going to need how are they going to build those things uh you know even you know so I prototype everything but sometimes that ships like the very first random event in Red Dead was uh the coyote being chased by a guy on a horse shooting a gun at it um that was sort of the simplest random event I could think of to spawn in the world nice and simple spawn three actors make them aggro on each other and go and that ended up shipping in the final game I know they did some polish on it stuff like that but like if that ended up shipping uh every once in a while you get a prototype that is just good enough to ship uh it might be great but like sometimes you need a lot of content I would argue it's way more than every once in a while um so yeah so one of the one of the core

philosophies I've always had is uh I hate to hand people work that I wouldn't do myself I hate to ask people to do something that I really wouldn't do something myself so if I go into something and see something where I'm like if I had to do this more than once I would be annoyed uh I'd go fix that go fix that right away like like make sure that when you're giving people work to do uh that it's something that you'd totally be willing to do by yourself like and then if if you can do that then I think you've got good workflows for everybody I think that's a really strong uh thing great what really well said I think that's a key part of this whole conversation I think that's where you get kind of the price of admission at this panel now we can step into uh some of the potential pitfalls you'll face in this role at the root of this we are problem junkies I've never seen people say no to more problems to solve and tinker and learn how things work especially living between engineering

and design always seeking to be Force multipliers right um and and that in heavily kind of ends with you being the default owner for a lot of things so the problem is what happens when you remove that times four multiplier on the team you know if you want to take a vacation or better yet you hit the lottery and want to retire so Alan back to you I cringe at thinking how we would have ever shipped Red Dead Redemption if it wasn't for you with those last kind of those last tail end of those months I'm curious to know what you've learned since then and hopefully at bungee to kind of mitigate this huge risk sorry it is a problem I I love knowing all about the project I love being the person that everybody comes to to ask questions of um I love being the person that is uh uh like going after new things uh but if you don't find a way to hand those new

things off then you're stuck with all of those new things um recently I've started uh you know people have always said you know you've spent so many plates this is really great how do you how do you manage all of it um and the real answer is uh you either crunch a lot or you do a half-assed job at some of them and you figure out how to prioritize so I've actually started seeing that like spinning plates a comment as a real backhanded compliment and it's time for me to start handing things off if I'm doing too much work I need to give that to somebody else um yeah like on on uh so you can be able to take a vacation uh you can take a sick day here and there um I had that happen on Red Dead and I took a two-week Australian vacation and that they gave me a Blackberry so that I could answer questions on email uh just in case something came up that uh you know they couldn't handle by themselves or that the knowledge was there so I spent because of the time difference I spent my first two hours every morning after I got up drinking coffee and

answering emails on my BlackBerry um I I and I want to stop that like I I uh I you know crunching is bad being the limp being the soul linchpin is bad um so you have to get uh find a way to get rid of it um you need to innovate yourself out of a job uh can you find another tech designer to own some of that stuff can you find a technically oriented designer to own sort of the um to be the proponent for that uh stuff and teach other people how to use the tools um find a QA person who's really good at that that wants to learn how to use the workflow and can be the person that everybody goes to to talk about uh if you're building scripting documentation uh build self-documenting apis build it so that your functions and your parameters actually kind of explain themselves what the function does um yeah start building your workflow documentation early and make it usable oftentimes you can build a skeleton as you're doing the first pass of it

um and have that be good enough then that first person that you teach it to that technically oriented designer the QA person they run into problems when they say they're like I was following the documentation and it didn't quite handle this you go fix it now you know you have somebody that actually can own and feel some responsibility for maintaining that documentation and knows it really well um so uh at Bungie we have uh this idea of shepherds so uh because Bungie's been Destiny's been in production for so long uh some of the systems we work with the people that originally authored them haven't worked at the company in five years or longer right so you have to be constantly developing uh new experts in all the different Technical Systems of the game and so we use the concept of shepherds to be that like Mo you need to have one or two Shepherds and everything so that they can hand off that knowledge they can tell people about it and then if one of those Shepherds leaves you have somebody that's ready to step into that role and then you start training another Shepherd so there's always somebody to answer the questions and there's always somebody learning um so that you never have that that kind

of brain drain uh and you get away from tribal knowledge which is a real problem on long-running uh long-running projects long-running games um yeah those are some of my thoughts um I think Jerome you had something you wanted to add yeah I mean I think one of the biggest challenges of being a tech designer is finding that balance between how much stuff you want to keep uh on your plate and how much you want to hand off that's a daily you know struggle for me um I think one of the most valuable things a tech designer brings to a production in general is is the knowledge that you kind of accumulate over the course of the project uh and that bird's eye view you have of either the entire game or parts of the game and your ability to instantly answer people's questions or Point them to whoever has the answer I'm sure everyone here regularly you know prevents hours and even days of unnecessary work by just being present in discussions about you know new features and kind of pointing out hey we could combine like these existing systems to do that

instead of just creating something new from scratch the problem is when you're the only person on the team that knows this stuff and as a tech designer it's just extremely easy to become that person because people will just get used to coming to you for information and it's just it's a lot easier most of the time to just tell someone that hey like that problem you're having you're asking me about uh just give me five minutes I'll fix it myself and you'll be immediately unblocked that's a lot easier to say than to take 30 minutes to you know 60 Minutes to sit down with that person explain to them what the problem is how to fix it so they can actually fix it themselves like Alan said but I think it's really like if you don't do that every time you don't do that you you're accruing like knowledge sharing that uh kind of like Tech debt and you have to pay that back at some point on the project um so I think it's important to regularly take a step back and evaluate kind of how vulnerable your particular area of ownership uh is and you know

plan time in your schedule to pay that knowledge sharing debt back uh I don't particularly enjoy spending an entire day you know documenting a feature that I made a couple weeks ago but in my experience it pretty much always pays off in the end plus it feels really good to just be able to paste the link to a documentation whenever people ask you a question saves you a lot of time saves you from getting derailed which can be a really big problem in this job um and that's something that I wish someone told me when I started this role uh because it's it's a very Insidious problem where you don't feel the effects of all those I'll just do it myself decisions that you make over the course of the project until much later in production where it's very difficult to solve that problem yeah and I just want to jump in on this really quick and say if you are watching this panel because you're thinking about creating a tech design department or building up your Tech design Department this is one of the biggest things because ultimately we

love supporting people and love helping people and if we're left to our own devices we will try to support everyone at the same time and I think this is one of the things that I have seen burn out Tech designers the most and so I think this is just really a huge topic uh that we can probably do a whole other talk on and um but yeah it is this is one of probably the most important things if you're looking to build your department yeah I like to think of it as like learning how to become a senior Tech designer is really learning how to be that person that everybody wants to come to to answer but learning how to advance past senior Tech design is learning how to never be that person ever again um hand it off to somebody else constantly that's a gem right there now I know how to get myself to the next level awesome

after all of this if we've somehow not scared you off and actually sparked an interest to get into doing this for yourself you may wonder you know should I go to school do I need experience and those are totally valid questions personally I know I was much better equipped after going through a whole production cycle on blacksite shipping that working in the tools seeing where they came up short and understanding how I can help that right and kind of offering that up also my programming background came in pretty handy so a question for you Jerome uh you came up from devqa and getting deep deep into Indie development which you know harmed you pretty well for this so what would you tell an aspiring Tech designer uh what they should focus on or even a current one how to level up yeah um I think it's it's probably difficult to get into Tech design as your first role uh in the industry it's not impossible but I think it would be difficult uh normally it's you know game

designers and level designers that kind of discover Tech design and maybe that's just because you know Tech design is still a fairly young role in the industry um I think I'm biased obviously but I think devqa or key and QA in general can be a good path to into Tech design because there's a lot of overlap in the mindset of a good tester and a good Tech designer uh it's a lot of like you know trying to think you know several steps ahead being able to reverse engineer things um Indie can be a great introduction to kind of the hard skills of tech design uh you know scripting prototyping touching a little bit of everything a little bit of Animation but that kind of generalist site that we talked about but I don't think It prepares you for the advocacy and kind of pipeline design that only really comes with scale um and I would say the most important thing as someone is trying to get into this role maybe fresh out of school or not is show your ability to learn quickly um strong technical skills are

definitely a plus but I think there's a direct correlation between your ability and desire to learn and your potential as a tech designer you can join a mod team you can you know pick up one of the freely available game engines like unreal Unity pick up some assets on the marketplace and build something small but complete that kind of demonstrates your understanding of the various parts of game design and how they interact with each other and I would say lastly ask yourself if you're okay with being in support role this is not a role where you usually get to Point at something in the final game and say like hey I made this it's a role where you get to a point at lots of different things in the final game and say I help these other people make this and if that Prospect of empowering other people sounds exciting and fulfilling to you I think you're a great candidate for this job and I know Alicia took you know a different path into this job than I did so maybe she has uh more input about that I do yeah when we were preparing

for this talk um there was a lot of debate about whether or not it was possible to have an entry-level Tech design job I did a lot of thinking about that and I do think it is possible to go from school into a tech design career but it'll probably be a few good years before you're doing your job really effectively since so much of it is in service to your team right if you are coming from school I do have a few pieces of advice as someone who came from school themselves right I don't think it's necessary for one that you're a great coder but I do think it's important that you have some engineering background or familiarity with coding that doesn't mean that you're an incredible programmer right just enough of a foundation that you can apply it to your work and be a better Communicator with engineering right because remember what I said before right we are a liaison between our design department and between engineering um so that it will just help that communication happen better right another thing I think is really ideal to dial in and Jerome mentioned this right is that advocacy thing and team education um I think that honing your skills there is critical to a successful design

Career Tech design career right uh Jerome said that that was something that he just wished that he knew earlier and I fully agree with him lastly I think that if you can find a tech Design Group and I know we're kind of hard to find but um we'll we'll talk about some uh some social networking after this right if you can find a tech Design Group to hit your wagon to absolutely do soak up the experience of those around you Twitter's actually a really good place to find us you know but like really hone in on something and become a subject expert and then once you're comfortable broaden your skill set yeah I think uh German Alicia had all the main points especially um you know pointing out that you can kind of do it from school or not but uh knowing being comfortable data that getting into Tech design right out of school may be challenging uh whether it's because you just need a little bit more experience to sort of build up that generalist nature that will help you do the job uh or it just might be because those roles are a little uh hard to find still um I know many of us like Alicia mentioned she sort of established

technical design at Crystal um the same with volition that the technical Design Group we started there was new so the role is still kind of new and up and coming and and so hopefully as we continue this conversation and stuff you'll see those Rules start popping up more and that might provide opportunities for uh people coming out of school um but in the interim just know that preparing yourself to be a good generalist whether that's going through school and getting some solid engineering background or doing some self-learning online just trying to build up your knowledge base and understanding our all things that you can do to help prepare yourself for the role and then as Jerome mentioned I think really understanding that idea of it being a support role is pretty critical because you want to make sure that you're feeling validated in the work that you're doing and so if you're good with being able to point to multiple features and say I enabled those to to either be there or to be as good as they were that for some people is extremely validating like myself and if that is you too then you probably will enjoy this role

yeah I uh I'll mimic that like get a learn to mod um learn to code uh learn how to use 3D programs learn how to use 2D art programs uh learn how to use sound programs learn all those things um if you're on a team already uh the thing I've always done is to be a better Tech designer is find the thing that nobody's doing find the thing that nobody's doing because they don't know how or are afraid to do it or uh don't know that they need to do it but find that thing that nobody is actually doing um and you'll be a super useful Tech designer there you go there you go I'm I'm I'm getting notes from my tool built as well and I've been doing this for a while so uh identity crisis averted right I hope that you have a better understanding of what this role means uh what it can be for

you how you can transition into it how to talk to your team about maybe getting more help and bringing some additional ones on so that your current one can take a vacation it's a EA's frostbite team sometime before they figure it out they could really use one so we're all still trying to figure this out um we've also covered how to best utilize this in a developer facing support role where we can be Force multipliers often something we talked about as well was that you should try to only kind of allocate 50 50 70 of uh Tech designers time right because that whole communicating and talking net always goes untracked and off the charts nobody wants to see that in a burn down chart but it's a very real part of our time and key to the role um and ultimately we've identified important processes to save us from ourselves and burning out or

overextending ourselves right our insects are always to jump into fires uh and and and support to our detriment and finally we ended on some key skills that will serve you in pursuing growing and nurturing this role there's a ton we had to Omit to fit this into the one hour slot but let's make sure to keep the conversation going come join our dedicated slack Community by jumping over to that URL you see on the screen so bits.ly Game Dev Tech design we've also fortunately snagged a live q a session slot later on today where you can speak directly with us one on one live I know there is a ton of questions in there we're eager to hear them and try to answer them in True Tech design fashion also fortunately most panelists have already gotten the clearance to come on to my auto play area podcast and do one-on-one interviews where I'm sure we'll dive deeper in on the craft go

deeper on how they got here and share more War Stories for your benefits so please follow so you don't miss out available everywhere you listen to podcasts Spotify even on YouTube and now finally I want to take this opportunity to extend my eternal appreciation for you guys and answering the call to make this panel what it is um it uh I hope it ends up being a very valuable reference for us all going forward in this craft I would have been super happy if like two or three of you said you could do it and I'm so ecstatic that all five of you said yes we're in and we'll do it and props to your employers and studios are jumping in you guys are my heroes um please fill out those evaluation forms so that we can continue coming back and Diving deeper in on this topic thank you stay dangerous fellow devs

[Music] thank you