Don't Just Hire Your Fans - Creating a Good Design Team - Extra Credits

ever notice how some games or even some game series tend to just get more hardcore over time how they seem to get less and less accessible and more and more focused on the things that only the top 1% of players seem to like well there's a lot of reasons for that but a surprisingly common one is because game companies end up implementing a hiring practice that sounds good on the surface but ends up shooting them in the foot they only hire their fans big thanks to our sponsor for this episode Skillshare the first 500 people to sign up with the link below get their first 2 months free games get more inaccessible more hardcore and more focused on the top tier players over time for all sorts of reasons sometimes it's because only the hardest core players are still playing and thus still paying so instead of risking everything on trying to bring in new players companies focus on creating content for the people they know will

buy it other times it's because the designers box themselves into a corner and limit their design space in such a way that they have to keep making the existing elements of the game more complex rather than more expansive and sometimes it's just because of accretion but one of the lesser-known reasons is because companies often insist on hiring designers who are fans of their games already I've seen a lot of job postings that require a designer to have at least 500 hours played have three max level characters or be platinum but that's actually not what you want if you want to keep your game fresh and accessible you actually want people on the team that don't already think your game is great at first glance this may seem weird I mean don't you want people with tons of experience with your game to carry on the design well yes but they can't be the only ones the problem with people who are already fans of a game is that they don't see anything fundamentally wrong with it

they see all sorts of small nitpicks places where things could be tightened up or where their favorite systems could be built out to even greater depth but they don't see the big flaws the stuff that in time will cut you from an audience you might never have known you could have had and this sort of fan designer is also so far removed from the new player experience it can be hard for them to fully understand it ever introduce a friend to a game that you think is simple only to find out that you're just so used to all of the weird or complex things in it that you don't even think about them anymore but as soon as your friend jumps in it's like hitting a brick wall for them will you don't want your designers replicating that experience as they build the onboarding for your game you don't want the people who are so used to pressing ctrl J as a hotkey that they forget that that would be a terrible hotkey for almost anything in a game sorry Zoe I know it's just the dwarf fortress rage kicking in I digress and

sometimes when you're a hardcore player you get so used to things even bad counterintuitive ones that when those things change they feel worse you don't want that very natural bias in your designers and just to be clear when I'm talking about fan designers I don't mean that companies are just hiring random fans these people are totally qualified game designers with titles shipped and years of experience under their belt they just also happen to be people the company requires to be fans of the game and having some of these is good you want people who have a lot of experience playing your game working on it you just don't want them to be the predominant voice on your design team because a professional can like working on a game without being a total fan of the game itself in much the same way that an architect can enjoy the challenge of designing a building that they'd never want to live in themselves and all of these natural biases of your fan designers are actually compounded by the fact they're prone to listen to the

most hardcore fans themselves not out of anything sinister but simply because those are the voices that are going to most resonate with them and that probably echo their own concerns these fan designers tend to be the most susceptible to listening to the design complaints of East Sports pros or the hardest core sections of the forums and use those complaints to justify design decisions and again this isn't entirely bad someone should be listening to those players because it's always important to keep your top end game healthy and vibrant but you also need people there to reign in those decisions and point out when they're costing you the rest of your player base a game that's a personal favorite of mine Starcraft 2 is probably the most notable example of this but gaming is littered with examples of fan designers making choices to satisfy the hardest core of the fan community this stifles change prevents your game from adapting with the times and makes it less accessible to a new audience at the end of the day it all

comes down to this all design decisions should be made with intent there are lots of reasons why a company might choose to focus on their hardcore fanbase those reasons may not be the ones that everyone always likes but they're often still very valid but it's when a game just sort of lists towards being inaccessible in hardcore because there's no one left on the team that can see there are alternatives that there are other decisions that could be made being great at a game shouldn't be a qualification for helping to design it instead in your interviews you should ask how much your potential designers have played your game and then have them explain why that will help you craft your design until next time everyone once again thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this episode they're a fantastic resource for learning and one of the most affordable learning platforms around when I first took my deep dive into their classes I learned about logo design portrait photography and how to make some very tasty

meatballs the first 500 that sign up with the link in the description below get their first two months free so go check them out and tell them extra-credit sent you [Music]