Force Multipliers: Longterm Design Careers for Non-Leads

[Music] thank you hi my name is Brett Norton and welcome to force multipliers long-term Design Careers for non-leats I'm the director of design development and cryptic studios in Sunny San Jose California in the United States I've been working design for just under 20 years or so and I've met a lot of people and I've seen a lot of careers develop and it's led me to want to do this session focusing on careers for designers especially those that don't want to be your traditional leader so let's get into that and let's talk about what we're all going to do so quick up first this will be broken down into three acts the First Act is going to be on designer criteria and this is we're going to quantify some of the basic design skills it will help us understand sort of the difference between someone who's a sort of senior ass designer and a non-senior designer step back two is going to be the Gap and this is where we get into sort of seniors versus non-seniors and leads versus anomalies this will help us

separate about what force multipliers kind of are and sort of where leads start to become sort of the traditional career trajectory for a lot of designers but what we can do else-wise and how we can separate the valuable skills that seniors provide us us even when they're not leads then act three is going to be focusing on growing Force multipliers that's going to kind of focus on ways to grow and develop people into being forced multipliers who aren't leads jumping straight into it target audience for the session is of course anybody who's a leader manager stakeholder anybody who really supervises your designers sort of a key portion of this audience and these will give you some strategies for how to work with the seniors and your team but we also want this to be targeted towards designers which is you know people who are learning for trying to figure out how to grow their careers maybe they don't want to be a traditional design lead but they still want to have a positive impact on their company and their projects and really kind of be that Force multiplier this will give you some ideas on how to talk with your supervisors about what you can do jumping straight into act one now let's go into that Designer criteria and talk about some of the skill sets and how we kind of separate some of the basic skills of designers from something more advanced skills we'll talk about

later so three kind of key sets that we kind of classified as under criteria and we've got your sort of professional skills project and development skills and general design skills but uh don't worry about this we'll go into a little bit more on each of these here in a second starting out with professional skills these are sort of just skills that are used at any job they're not really specific to design or even necessarily the gaming industry as a whole but they're still important job skills for things like communication and attendance fairness and generally these are kind of graded on a binary pass fail and these generally make you a more pleasant person to work with it's important to know we don't necessarily consider these a lot in sort of gaming industry careers but for people who have never had a career outside the gaming industry they may not have all these skills in developing them as they start out their jobs at the early ranks of being a designer is still important and you still kind of want to grade that in some cases next up we've got project and development skills which are things that are more specific to like a project technology or company that might be things like IP knowledge like what do you know about DND if you're working on a Dungeons and Dragons games or maybe Star Trek if you're working on a Star Trek game genre knowledge what do you know about Shooters if you're working on a shooter you know how much do you know

about RPGs um if you're working on one of those uh things like development environment though too like and you know how your asset manager works you know how to get things in and out of builds and troubleshooting do you know what to who to talk to or what to do when a problem occurs these the type of skills that make you more efficient and effective and generally quick to work with in your team sort of specific development environment and sometimes they're very specific to an actual project or you know maybe just a specific line of tech then we have design skills and these are sort of specific to your design subdiscipline these are like systems designer skills level designer skills content designer skills writer skills Etc these might be those specific to a bit of a genre and engine because sometimes there's some very specific skills like Shooters have some specific skills to their genre that don't necessarily map over to say puzzle games and that's just the way things go these are the skills that allow you to really build features and content and get them into the game in a fun interesting way so let's quantify a few of these designer skills because you have some general skills and I'm not going to try to list all of them I can do a whole presentation just on design skills but you do have general ones with things like math and yes systems designers are

going to have a lot more math skills generally but we also have things like general ones like usability and player communication these are important facets for designers to understand and grow into and they're good things for all designers to have so then moving beyond that we have specific implementation skills which are going to be things like items or perhaps say item assignments and with items it might be something like okay we're going to implement a bunch of Swords into our games and that'll be a reward that we use but item assignments are something that we use for say are professions or a crafting system that's how we kind of group things like how you make a sword what are the different sword recipes Etc both those are done through different Tools in our tool set in engine and so we actually quantify those as completely different skills and Associate grading with each of those and there's also some things we have which we call like FSM scripting which is more like AI scripting you may have different tools or names for it but it's basically how well do you script Ai and what do you do with those sorts of things so skill progression let's talk a little bit how we quantify some of those skills so some skills are just binary or very simply graded which is like pass fail and again things like attendance you know it's either good enough or it's not and you're generally not going to try to

like give them a score or anything but another way of doing uh something that's not just a sort of like a one through ten or one through five scores you can do what we call literacy competency and Mastery and that breaks down into kind of these three categories which are kind of listed right there but what it really comes down to is that if someone progresses you know they they go from sort of being able to just copy and paste things within it to being competent and understanding it to really having a true Mastery of it and being able to actually improve on it and do new things with it and all those are important and if someone grows uh that might be their target it's like hey develop literacy in items and then later on literacy and item assignments and then competency in items competency and item symptoms and Mastery Etc and it creates sort of a progression path a targeted easy way for designers as they work their way through sort of Junior and staff levels to to grow in these individual contribution skills a quick apt one recap we've talked about professional skills which is for any job project and development skills which are sometimes project Tech or tools or Dev team specific and these design skills which sometimes translate you know between teams and projects sometimes they're they're specific but overall

these the Crux of really key design skills we've got now let's talk about Act 2 and this is the gap and this is where we get into some interesting difference between what a force multiplier is and what is and one one isn't so first up it's non-seniors versus seniors so with staff rankings this will help break down kind of like when people are often called seniors within the industry but I'll separately talk about one I think that they really are so Juniors these are people usually that have been around for say zero to three years they're mostly focusing on how quickly they can learn they have a lot of literacy a little competency probably no Mastery and maybe there's a little bit more again if you have a great educational background you went to a great design school you came in you might have higher competency Mastery than than someone else is a junior just and so you'll see some variants within that one but then after a couple of years eugenic it's like a staff maybe it's a little bit sooner maybe it's a little bit more later and this is where you have a high degree of Competency and you're contributing to content and features you're building a lot of shippable reliable stuff and you can really do a lot of the the bulk work for a game now at that point again maybe you've got a few things that you're a master at now you can probably do some things pretty well especially if you've

been sort of like practicing and learning ahead but then we get into seniors and seniors have an ambiguous start range maybe it's five years maybe it's six years but it's not just based on experience because when you get to be a senior you know we start to care about how well you can own content and features it's it's more about being a driving force that's kind of like what a lot of being a forced multiplier is it's really being able to drive a force it's not just being really good at making items it's like you know can you help Define new item systems or new reward Avenues those sorts of things and seniors generally have a high degree of Competency and a lot of Mastery in a lot of related areas which allows them to really be those effective feature or content owners now there are rankings Beyond seniors such as um there are things like principles which may be sometimes a kick in at 10 plus years and that's now starting to determine how well you can drive like whole projects or perhaps large teams or even abstract goals and this requires obviously a lot of experience and a lot of exposure and you're expected to be highly masterful in a lot of areas as well as maybe still having company in some areas Etc but when you get to the principal level you have a ton of experience you've probably shipped more than a couple games you've you know you've been through the

rigmarole a few times and you have a lot of lessons learned on how to do things well and what pitfalls to avoid but there's an extra secret ranking based on careful discussions and interviews and investigations into some of the people that I talked with before this presentation there's also additional groups which you call either experts sometimes they're called Architects and sometimes they're called senior experts but these are sort of like principles but with incredible experience and expertise and uh they have invented things like genres or entire IPS or new modes of gameplay they've done something fairly stand out something that probably required a lot of risk and a lot of expertise and they pulled it off and were very successful within it that doesn't necessarily monetarily successful sometimes it just means they were very Innovative and did something uh very interesting they've proven themselves to set themselves apart these are sort of like the doctorates if you will of the design world where they've kind of had a thesis that's been vetted either by the community or other designers we don't have a formal process for this within the gaming industry or generally companies that a whole but experts are pretty rare in talking with some designers they were companies that had 150 plus employees and they may only

have two or three experts um sorry 150 designers and only two or three of those maybe experts but it's a very coveted role and it doesn't happen a lot as you can see because it requires 15 maybe 20 years experience there aren't even a lot of designers that actually have that level of experience much less those could quantifies experts as having done something so outstanding is to sort of be their doctoral thesis moving on let's talk about the inflection point this is when a designer suddenly has competency pretty much all their key areas a system designer with a lot of Competency they've got Mastery in some they're getting good you know and they're getting efficient and they can improve things and they start to start to understand but these skills alone aren't enough to be a force multiplier because you're probably still like very heavily buried in a lot of sort of icy skills again like items and items assignments or maybe scripting that sort of thing what you really need to get good at is the skills Let It Be an owner um because that's what's going to let you really be a force multiplier so senior plus is going to require a new type of skills you get to start over with skills like ownership which is related to process mentorship which is related to management Vision which is related to architecture technical design which is a

lot related infrastructure I'll get more of that it's kind of a loaded term because it sometimes uses a job too and then multi-classing which is a form of Versatility which is important and don't worry these things are going to come up a lot don't feel like you have to write them down now I'm going to go through them multiple times so let's talk about each of these individual skills and why they are these new skills that you don't develop early on but suddenly start becoming more important and meaningful and Define senior pluses so ownership is sort of a Mastery of process and pipelines at many various stages and not just like the design stages the art stages the QA stages the audio stage they really understand how things like a map goes through so many different stages through concept and white boxing all that and they understand what things can be done better you know maybe they're a level designer and they're at their principal level is not but they understand aha good Concepts will let me do my job better so three months before I start a white box I need to make sure that we've got good Concepts and they get that they have very quality inner Department communication say they're a systems that they're good with talking with content designers and level designers and writers it's not the people that they work most closely with but if they need to get something implemented into a map they know they can go to the level or content designers

and work with them to get a quality implementation in the map on their feature and they also have quality inter department they can talk with artists and programmers they know the people they commonly work with and who they need to support to make the feature or content good that's that ownership thing is it's about caring more than just about the design component of it it's also understanding that you need good art and good problem everyone has to succeed for a feature to be good or a piece of content to be good so on the mentorship side this is where your senior your seniors make experts out of non-experts um this is the teaching Mastery to others and so I look at it like you know a senior designer or principal next designer is not a samurai wandering alone in the Wasteland slaying Monsters by himself he's a guy that goes to a dojo and helps train other students to become Master themselves it doesn't have to be the master of the dojo maybe he doesn't want that task of you know running a bunch of sensei's and a whole ton of students but he can at least train other people and make them more skilled as well he can create disciples and and not only can he do this with designers but can do with non-designers too he can train artists a little bit he

can train programs a little bit he can make them care about the things that they should care about to make for a better total end quality thing you know designers sit in the spot where they they see a lot of the connection points and that's the real strength that they can offer even if they're not a people lead is that sort of connectivity that they offer between the teams and disciplines and understanding the vision of things speaking of vision that's the next skill we'll talk about so I talk about non-senior designers first they're often reactive designers the sense that they will respond to Direction and they can fix all kinds of problems they can Implement things and you know if bugs come along they'll be able to address them they can make reasonable deductions about how to address problems and you know they'll get things and they'll solve problems for you and so you can think of those like curves you throw them at bugs that you have to make them go away cure them improve things and move on once the issues kind of known they can deal with it but your senior designers no they're proactive designers they're the ones that are going to set directions they're going to set standards they're going to prevent bugs from ever happening they're going to save you work in the long run and they're going to be able to solve risky or more complex or more volatile problems because of their experience and

because their ability to set Direction and earn things early on they've seen these things and I think of them as vaccines they prevent issues from ever happening if you find if you supposedly have senior designers and you find yourself constantly mired in issues maybe they're not seniors just because they've spent six years in the industry doesn't necessarily make them a senior maybe they haven't shipped enough games they haven't seen the life cycle of specific content or features enough to know what problems happen early that can be that you know what problems will happen late that are caused by decisions made early and it's important for them to have that experience in those types of areas so just because you have six years of experience it doesn't just make you a senior because maybe you haven't gotten the right type of experiences yet so on the technical design end it's something that's a very valuable subset design but it's an ugly ambiguous term and in course of interviews for this session I got terms such as like they're just programmers who can design they're programmers who can script or maybe they write tools or they do something in Lua talking with multiple different designers at different companies I got very very different definitions of what a technical designer job is and it was not consistent at all so let's throw out

um what the the job itself means let's focus on sort of like the specific skills I want to say that I think technical designers are designers that focus on improving how design builds and delivers and features and content I kind of view that as infrastructure design I don't think anyone wants to have the title as infrastructure designer if you do that's awesome and I like you a lot but most people probably don't want to be called infrastructure designers unfortunately but that's kind of the Crux of really where they add value and add sort of force multiplication to a project so infrastructure design would focus on things like tools standards and process there's a little bit of overlap there with the process skill and let's talk about a little thing I call the cake analogy and I stole this I can't take credit for it but it's a good one so if designers are sort of like Cooks in a kitchen and they are making cakes then their job is to deliver cakes to customers they're still programmers and artists and they're doing things like making ingredients you know putting the frosting on the cake Etc they're very involved in the process too but that's kind of the coke that do a lot of the baking and trying to get the ingredient mixes right and cook it for just so long to make it the tastiest possible okay in that role technical designers make cake

mixes they're more like prep chefs they're the ones who are going to pre-make a lot of things so if you know you're gonna make a bunch of cakes and people really like chocolate cakes you might want to have a chocolate cake mix ready to go so you can just turn out those cakes really fast and that's what technical sorry technical designers will do they will build you those cake mixes so you can churn out uh even more cakes or higher quality and more consistent cakes and that's how they add efficiency they're making everyone else's work easier they're adding that valuable valuable infrastructure last step in terms of multiplayers let's talk about multi-classing that versatility aspect of valuable seniors so these are designers that can fulfill multiple roles they had flexibility of the team not directly throughput but because they kind of make up for like inefficiencies or sometimes can speed things along they kind of fight that whole corruption or waste or inefficiency of of that occurs in any kind of team especially ones with you know like that that when you have to deal with the production issues and sometimes even very large teams so small teams and medium teams generally value this a little bit pretty highly because they may not be able to staff every little sub-discipline you know if you're

a level designer and a system designer and you know every now and then you can jump between those two and do that work very effectively that can be valuable because there are times when they may need a lot of level design and times when they may need a lot of systems design and then on very large teams as I talked about because they're oftentimes sort of uh waste issues uh it kind of comes back full circle well now having multi-class and versatile people they can plug them in to strike teams or pods or agile teams Etc in ways to fill things out that make that that large huge management version a little bit so it's kind of that middle tier where you have enough people to be specialized and you don't necessarily need multi-classers but in the small end you need they're valuable and very large and they can start being valuable yet but it's very picky based on your your company and team structure so for multi-class designers tips you don't sell your cell phones multi-class because you're probably not thinking about in the right ways it takes years of training to be a multi-class efficient you want to think yourself as basically being an effective staff level or near senior or maybe you know you know just the cosplay senior in both disciplines

if you want to be say a level designer environment artist which is sometimes a common overlap it means you kind of want to be capable being a staff environment and a staff level Center or maybe a early senior level designer and a middle staff environment artist that is tough that can take a career change or years of training in both or a lot of individual practice within that one leaders if someone is bowling billing themselves as multi-class be suspicious of devs who build themselves a multi-class because a lot of times it means that they're underestimating they're basically saying hey I am a junior in two disciplines I can do both Junior Quality Senior Systems design work and Junior quality level doesn't work but that's often not what you need you don't need you know two Junior quality uh disciplines you need like them to be hired so if they truly are multiple multi-class they've often done both those jobs at some point in their career before they've had years of doing it and you can have that be part of the interview you can say cool you think you're a level designer environment nurse you will conduct part of the interview with the lead level designer and part of the interview with Elite environmenters they will review your

your portfolios in both areas and grade you and you need to pass both to be Quantified as a sort of senior multi-class person that's how strict you can get with that if you really want to grade that in loud some people will make it and they're fantastic but a lot of people will start to realize how serious you are about it when you say that they have to have portfolios in both and both will be regretted by their respective disciplines so cap Part One summary let's talk about the a little bit on the Mastery design skills and Tool systems not a senior make up just because you are really good with say items doesn't mean that you're a senior yet um you have to demonstrate all those additional skills we've talked about and again they'll come back up a lot senior centers also must routinely demonstrate skills in these things which is ownership mentorship again Vision technical design and multi-classing all those things and it gets a routine it's about a good batting average it's not just about doing it once it's about consistently doing it and and really being able to Showcase that that you know you can do it over and over again it's not it's not a binary pass fail thing so let's get into Gap part two

which we're going to talk about leads versus non-leads we've laid out some skills that are important for seniors and it leads off and have a lot of these twos obviously things like mentorship and management seems right up Elite alley so how are all these Force multiplier skills I talked about not just the aspects of being Elite well let's get into that first off leads also a dirty and weird and ambiguous term that it lacks a lot of consistency within different companies and within the industry as a whole if you're a lead multiplayer designer are you leading multiplayer if you're the lead online designer leading online are you leading people or are you leading features it's a weird term there because we kind of use the two somewhat interchangeably I've seen teams where they had a lead you know lead person over a subset and they had no one reporting underneath them so they were very much a feature lead and not a people lead so let's focus our discussion now on people leaders because these are the people that we often see as the ones who get promoted things like lead designer or design director and that's more traditionally seen as sort of the the end game for Design Careers right now where people are just like well if you want to get to the tippy top of the design ladder you need to become a lead

designer or you need to become a design director or something along those lines but that's let's start carving on spaces for people who don't want to go down the people your path because people leaders are really supervisors or managers uh they lead people it's not projects or features related what they're really focusing on is people and they're trying to grow people and improve on people because people are your really speaking you're you're one of your best assets as developer that one of your most important and growing your designers is great and it's it's very valuable it's sort of the force multiplier aspect of it's fairly obvious because they're making your people more effective and that's such a huge part of your team structure so people leaders now uh they focus on a few of these sort of senior plus skills which is obviously the mentorship one management ownership and they have a expect to have Vision but I'll note that you know you can't have good people leaders that don't always have the greatest Vision components if they're supported by other seniors on the team that do have good Vision components that's where you can get into some great Dynamics where you can have a people leader that is focusing more on the mentorship and owner side and then non-people leaders that are focusing a little more on the vision than others and you get that good combination the

key thing there is when building a team is to have you know combinatory skill sets that that really work together and make the whole team uh better as a whole so this is a really more of a professional development skill focus the key thing to note is that a lot of people who have people whose skills have a tendency to get out of design at some point in their career because they start to realize that oh I'm really good at leading groups not just designers but I can lead whole teams and they often get out and go into things like production or business or they find companies or sometimes they leave the gaming industry unfortunately and just go on to to run groups at other Industries where they get sometimes paid more or just like the work better Etc so these translate well into other fields that's kind of the natural hands that's why it's sometimes really hard to keep people leaders around and they're kind of like the design parents um yeah they're raising design children they have to be good cop and bad cop um they need to celebrate successes but they also need to hold people accountable they got to be the disciplinarian sometimes too which is not everyone's great at and I'll talk about some of these red flags now um you know if you have leaders at your company or you're trying to think about growing people into a leadership role

there's some red flags if they don't find much joy in the success of others it's going to be tough to be a people you know you kind of want people that like to sort of like play the Minion class in RPGs um because they find joy in seeing other things succeed you know because they're not going to get as much time to be an individual contributor themselves so they have to really find some level of joy in what other people do and when they succeed and growing them to be more successful um they also can't be the type they're easily flustered by Juniors or non-experts because they're gonna have to deal with Juniors especially quite a lot so they gotta you know enjoy Trend those Juniors up to becoming even just staff level people it's going to be a large portion of their career and if they focus either too much on celebration or discipline it can lead to some problems I'm everyone kind of generally starts over those some people are like yeah you're awesome we're really good but could you please not do that or they're like no everything you do is not good enough do things better here's 10 things you're doing wrong improve on those and you need to find people that have a good balance and that can do both those I think people generally start from either celebrant or a disciplinarian side and they need to grow towards the other and good people leaders recognize which side they start on and they work really hard

to grow towards the other and lastly um be careful people who are reluctant to make the hard Staffing decisions and that doesn't mean just like firing people that sometimes is part of being a People Eater job it sometimes can also mean hiring when you have two very valuable candidates and they have to choose between there can be a lot of Heartache there you know it's not difficult to say you get the job you go thrown out in the cold and that can cause a lot of emotional stress so if they're really reluctant and it really wears them down you know it's going to grade on them too much and it's gonna make their jobs un enjoyable in the long run on the ownership side there's some red flags here where if you're not good at breaking work into discrete steps or your people you currently have a people leads are doing that odds are maybe they're not the greatest person to be your people leads or if they're uncomfortable around non-designers or uninformed audiences that's also probably because people leaders have a tendency to have to explain gameplay things to artists programmers QA producers even producers outside or within your own company sometimes business partners and that's kind of their job they constantly have to deal with uninformed audiences and that can be you know exasperating and tiring for some people when they're just constantly

explaining the basics over and over again so you need people that are resilient to that and you also need to kind of deal with uh anyone that struggles to identify efficiency problems again because those process skills are so important and getting a team to be efficient and and working really quick you need people that can understand how to work a little bit with tools understand working with process understand how to work with other departments to expert things like hey going back like we're going to build this level but we need Concepts meaning those Concepts need to be done three months from now so get us those Concepts early they need to be able to identify those efficiency improvements in your process and help drive them forward so last thing talking about leadership then we'll jettison the leadership conversation and get back to focusing more on non-leads but staff ranks have different costs on sort of on the leadership burden and so if you're a junior it's like 20 staff maybe 15 senior 10 the numbers a little fuzzy and it kind of depends some Juniors cost more some seniors cost less Etc but point being is that if you have a team and say they have four Juniors on it and they have a senior on it um that is a 90 cost on that lead they're not going to get much individual contribution to work done and they're going to spend a bunch of their time might not micromishing but

managing supervising reviewing and planning for the work of those people um and that's largely their job and so if you have someone that's great with 90 leader versions cool so I'm on that team but say we have Team Omega which is zero Junior there's a couple of staff and a couple of seniors that's maybe only really about a 65 cost in the lead and they're gonna get to do some small amount of individual contribution work so this might be a better team for someone who's not as experienced a people leader and you know it isn't quite ready just give up entirely and being a strong individual contributor and when you're growing people eaters it's pretty basic calculate that rough percent cost in your people eater start them at a small percent and work them up to 100 eventually they'll get to the point where they don't get to do any individual contribution work and they spend all day planning and reviewing and uh that's what happens to a lot of people leaders within the design history that's sort of the the Grim reality of the whole thing but in any case uh the uh the reality is is that you got to remember please that managing Juniors is not the same as managing seniors that's an easy mistake that a lot of people

make and it's very important for leadership as you are appointing People to People leadership positions I understand that though many Engineers a lot harder you may manage a team of five and be extremely high burden or you may be managing a team of five seniors have have extremely low burden but where does this lead the non-people leaders um and so let's talk about the super secret Staffing note um it's not that secret but it's important to call attention to is that most designers and in I believe honestly most developers genuinely don't want to be people eaters as much as we tell the being designed lead or being the design director as the ultimate career path for designer that's not actually what a lot of designers would do instead what they really want is the agency and the power that comes with a lead title or role but they don't want the burdens of being a real supervisor or manager all the time that causes other problems so um that leads to some issues because few designers really want to give up on being individual entirely give up on being individual contributors to focus purely on management they can do other things besides individual contribution

work but but managing people maybe isn't their strength but they still want to be a force multiplier so non-people leaders not want to be supervisors or managers how can we grow them to be effective Force multipliers well there's a few things non-people leaders need to become effective Force multipliers by improving everyone's efficiency quality and ability to take risks not just their own everyone's that's where these values come in again we're talking about Force multipliers here they still expand outside their individual contribution work and make the team project tools Etc better so let's hang on sorry repeat here and this is how they're going to do it they're going to do it through these types of skills here um these are the people leaders generally focus on process which is a little bit of overlap with your uh you sort of your people leaders they're going to do it through Visions for that architecture component which is again also sometimes share with leaders but they can be they have often opportunities to be stronger at it and they can also do it through things like technical design which is that infrastructure and then if they can

maybe they can be a multi-class where they can really fit in so now we'll get into sort of the bulk of this we're going to talk about which is act three growing Force multipliers how do we gross and force multipliers well let's go back to that skill list once again I promise I'd bring it up a lot so let's do it one more time we've got ownership we've got mentorship we've got Vision we've got technical design and we've got multi-class I'm going to talk a little bit about each of these categories and how we can grow each of them to make for better designers so starting off with ownership let's talk about non-people leader ownership so non-people leaders still contribute to ownership you can't whiz your way out of it that easy senior designers you still have to help Define maintain all the various process and pipelines that the studio company project is going to use the reality is that in growing leadership to do that you need your non-people leaders to participate in some key pipeline stages such as kickoffs or pitches various entrants and executory definitions for intermediary pipeline stages and also sort of the follow-ups things like

postmortems retrospectives other things that you may do at the end to quantify how well you did and the more they're involved in all those the better I'll talk about a couple of them but for something like postmorms retrospectives there are literally whole GDC sessions on just on how to do good post-mortem retrospectives a lot of learning materials on those I recommend looking those if you want to know more so kick off some pitches key things here is to define the boundaries of features and content amongst the team stakeholders a while before you sort of turn something over to a senior you know give them some deadlines give them resources you know if it really takes programs give them to them and then set a target audience whether it's a subset of people within your game or an audience that you'd like to hit it's important to establish those boundaries with them and then sort of see how the seniors go from there when they do these kicks off and Pages after that getting seniors involved or prospective seniors involved and kicks off kickoffs and pitches helps them develop that sense of agency even if they're not the people leader or the design lead if they can be involved in kickoff and pitches that's what's helping to grow that sense of Aging make them feel like they're doing something and they'll start to care as well as when they're involved in these early stages of features it starts to let them

understand uh what things go well during a kickoff or pitch that leads to better results at the end this is all part of that whole becoming a vaccine instead of just a cure you got to be involved early if you want to become a vaccine eventually so pipeline stages now um require non-leads to help Define pipeline stages resist the temptation to just always make the lead be the guy that has to do it you know if you have questions like what does a level designer need to start building a white box uh your senior level designers can should be able to answer that question same thing a little bit is like what does an environment art need um once the level designer is done to keep things going yeah your senior level designer should be able to help answer that too and if they haven't they need to start exploring conversations with environmentalists and you know develop that inner Department uh communication skills those are key things of becoming a force multiplier they take some of the burden off of your people leaders uh in these areas by being able to do these sorts of things and on the mentorship end let's talk about growing mentorship now on uh non-people leaders so growing mentorship teaching seniors to be uh to be teachers it's important and you can do this

through a couple simple things such as the buddy system peer reviews and presentations all right let's move on now to the buddy system so the buddy system this is where we prayer prospective seniors with Juniors and this is going to be useful because you can train them on things like standards and organization uh processing pipelines and as well as just Team Dynamics who do you go to to answer X question who is the most important artist to know when these issues raise up and there's a lot of value to this because a lot of times this falls on leads and doesn't have to juniors are often seen as burdens unfortunately where it's like well there's this new guy coming in he's an entry level and so and so and no one wants to deal with them but that's that's the wrong attitude these are great training opportunities for seniors this is a chance for them to get real mentorship experience so resist the temptation to make the leads always do it utilize your seniors or prospective seniors to handle this and make sure you grade the results when you get done with like buddy systems and you're training people up in this method talk to the Buddies both the senior and whoever they were being a buddy with and

evaluate how well they did get feedback and then work with the senior to improve and let them know it's like hey this guy thought you did good this or thought you did well on that and that's the real Crux of it you really want people to understand how they can do these things better so moving on next to peer reviews um so reoccurring previews are a great thing due to them say like you know every other Friday or every Friday Etc have people go in and look at work it's just a great way to you know get your team to see each other's works and builds cooperation and sort of like good practices between share between everyone but also remember to like Landmark peer reviews and important risks even if it's a senior or non-senior and your seniors can participate it's like hey we've got this staff guy he's doing this thing it's a little risky halfway through you know please jump in there and take a look at how he's doing it to make sure that things are staying on track but I'm gonna have a ranton coming here and I'm the only reason I've really got but I'm gonna do a rant on peer reviews here real quick so number one peer reviews are not only supposed to be done yet like I said with risky things you need to do them earlier on don't wait till the end to only do your peer reviews number two is up there peer reviews are not just play tests if you were only

looking at things from a playability standpoint uh you are not doing a correct preview you need to go in and look at how things are you need to critique standards comments usage reliability the how is what is critically important as part of the peer review it's so great yes you still want to critique the what you don't ignore that but you can't have an effective peer review that doesn't look at how things are built especially with more junior or younger people you have to critique everything from standards commentary again all that kind of stuff get in there look at the how and make sure you're doing a good job with that okay rant on peer review is over move on to the next section which you can help out training grow enjoy your leaders here which will be on presentations there's lots of presentations that people can give I know sometimes they don't like to but this is part about getting those communication skills up and educating people and some of this is for things like tools demonstrations have them go in and just demonstrate how perhaps tools are used and that may not be well known maybe they're more Edge Casey but you know get that familiarity built with the rest of the team competitive analysis you want to add a battle pass to your game and have them do competitive analysis and have them present it not just write a document that they throw over the fence actually

get up and talk to designers and non-designers about it gameplay Concepts you want to pitch new modes risky new things again do some exploration early on and have them do present presentations about how to educate the team and then training videos update your training videos have your seniors or perspectives like hey we know you're really good with X and you're wanting to grow up to be a senior so let's have you train other people by making a new set of trading videos with it and see how good you really are and to note once again Target presentations at other disciplines too you know do some of these things like competitive analysis or training videos that will benefit non-designers artists programmers QA Etc make them broaden their Horizon and ensure that they can communicate well with other departments that doesn't mean changing their lingo means not trying to be an expert and talk only in expertise it's about Building Bridges you need to take your expertise up here and the all the other people in your company they're waiting on here and build that bridge you know we don't need a whole bunch of people to sit up high and and you know lower their expertise over the world we don't need a tyranny of subject matter experts we need designers that help build other subject matter experts let's

go into Vision here this is a tough one because Vision relates to architecture writes the foundational building a lot of key elements and for the hardest and risky skills to build but also one of the most vital for all people to be forced multipliers to other one and there are entire GDC sessions that talk on ways of sort of growing this and what you can do that relates to things like prototyping it relates to things like finding the fun iteration and affordances all those types of things we you can find tons and tons of educational materials that'll show you like this is how you do effective in time box prototyping or this is how you can work on affordances I'll go into a few of these to talk a little bit about it but there's a lot of educational material related just on growing vision and things you can do within your teams on those gameplay insight for example taking gameplay from average to good is often the key goal of what a designer has if they actually have sort of this good Vision or good architecture skills um that does not mean that you need to take everything from average to good there's this misconception that seniors or principals or experts are so good that they'll take all of your gameplay features from nearly average to good uh in reality they're going to take the key

elements of your game from average if you're an action game that's probably going to be something like combat mechanics uh Gunplay swordplay whatever the case may be if you're doing a puzzle game it's probably something like Puzzles um those that's a key aspect of your game and it needs to be good if not great or excellent and designers that have that sort of vision Orchestra will understand they'll put their emphasis on those key areas and they will propel them upwards and there's ways that they do it again cover a little bits of those but let's talk a little bit about affordances and affordance is a lot of type of small gameplay improvements that allow you to do things better the classic examples and a lot of Platformers after your character steps off of a platform they have a small Windows say a tenth of a second in which the player can still press the jump button and the character will just jump in the air that's an affordance it makes the game feel more usable even though you're cheating the game cheating the physics and cheating the simulation to make the game more playable and do what the player wants and that is a key part of iterating all gameplay and everybody that has good Vision understands the search for those so designers won't know everything in advance though about what

affords do they need to find however they should know some of the affordances if they literally know none of the affordances then they're probably not the person that has Vision that area you know especially if you switch genres if you switch working on strategy games to Shooters you're not going to know the affordances and Shooters and you've got to do some research and some education to find the basic ones quick you know that there's gonna be more of them good seniors understand like oh God we've got to find more of these as quickly and as efficiently as possible that's what all those GDC presentations are about is using that iteration and prototyping time to find those affordances fast and efficient so you're going to need to set aside time to help find these affordances and you need people to train on that but that's how you kind of grow that skill set is literally through practice and experience audience wise key thing for designers to understand is that non-senior designers often badly assume unfortunately that they are the audience um they or someone like them is the audience and that's kind of again not really how all games are targeted the reality is that a lot of our games don't have a single audience and number two sometimes the designers aren't even the core audience there and Senior plus designers generally focus on like

audience questions they want to know what games does our audience play what are their play sessions like do they play for 15 minutes do they play for 45 minutes that's that kind of information is really going to help you target do you make a 30-minute dungeon or a 60-minute dungeon if your sessions on average are only 15 minutes long don't be making 60 Minute dungeons so um and then they also ask things like how many different audiences plays our game uh cryptic works on a lot of MMOs and we've discussed a lot like Bartles tax I mean the different types of players that affect it you know people who like Mastery people who like social elements you're not going to have just one audience at any given game especially big games the bigger the game the more types of audiences you have and it's important understand that your game will appeal to different audiences and that different features will Target them seniors get that and they will ask questions to discern that now for growing Vision once again it can be trained slowly it can be trained through education again GDC YouTube educational videos I'll call out to extra credits in the game makers toolkit they have a lot of starting great starting points there it can be done through practical experience build those prototypes carve out time just to build prototypes even

if they don't succeed you'll gain experience doing that a focus tests though are excellent for you know growing your designers appreciation audience there's nothing like seeing a designer watch someone struggle to play their level that grows their appreciation of who Their audience really is so leverage those sometimes that's just there for the experience even it doesn't necessarily make the game a ton better it will help your designer understand their audiences better unless they workshops and this isn't necessarily just like GDC workshops this is like you can run workshops within your company get all your level designers together give them two days have them pick up subject material do sort of like a pro prototype or a game jam on it and then sit them and have them do review results and see if the visions that they chose and then attempted to exit execute on that window worked out and if not why not and what they learned from it that's the way you can kind of like if iterating small microcosms and lower risk ways on growing that vision so growing through failure good news the bad news is that failure is often a great way to learn vision and it's also kind of costly on projects and teams so projects need opportunities for designers to risk failure to grow and

the thing though is you can't kill the project because they took risks so you need to fall and skin your knees but not break the Project's legs in the process so there's not every feature you can afford necessarily to take big risks on so don't don't be upset if you know your teams it doesn't want you to take big risk on like a very important core combat you know the number of big risks you take is often limited by the number of very Vision heavy and trustworthy seniors that you have that can absorb that you know if you've got one guy your team that's got really good Vision that really limits the number of risks you can take if you've got four guys that are really good vision and understand that they're gonna you're gonna be able to take a lot more effective risks let's go into technical design or as I wish I could sometimes call it infrastructure design here so let's harken back to the cake mix example we talked about how Dev teams are delivering cakes and designers are the the cooks trying to make those cakes and Technical designers are the the sort of the prep the prep Cooks they're trying to make consistency and efficiency of cake production better and this is how they become a Force multiplier is that they're just making everybody's work

again efficient or better quality so with that in mind how do you grow these sort of infrastructural designer technical sign it's fairly easy again it's largely practice but what are some of the things that you're going to want to practice well let's talk about standards this is a bit of overlap with processors you know incorporate them in things like file and folder naming standards and make them handle enforcement of it make them actually say okay we are going to put files like this or folds will be used like this as we put new things in the game they need to hear these standards and they will monitor other designers content designers systems designers whatever the case you may have they're going to monitor that and enforce it report arrows perhaps work with attack on tools to to validate naming automatically they'll do things like data organization heart again they'll have that level Vision where they're thinking hey we're like okay we have 10 of these things and maybe our naming structure works for 10 of them but when we have a thousand of them will this still hold up or not and they'll be able to guide you to data structures that will service the long game you know just because a naming structure or data hierarchy is good and fast and simple to use when there's 10 things doesn't mean it's going to stay

that way for long and you don't want to commit to a naming structure that Buckles at the end of the project because you wanted one that was really efficient early on for prototyping so growing technical design also in the tools and they can obviously you know help with things like data entry automation they can point out if they know how to actually build scripts they can just build possibly some scripts to do that that's more on the coding side but it's not a requirement they can however oppositely just sort of be a tech liaison where they can work with people who do make some of those tools and they can quantify the value and this is a big difference being a tech liaison in this sense is not just about saying like we could use a tool that does X and then you write up a Jitter or something and send it over and forget about it it's more about like okay hey um this is what we need this is how we do this is our workflow this is how we could save time if we could automate these first 10 steps of this data entry we'll save say 5 15 or 20 minutes per designer per instance and we're probably going to do this like 600 or 700 times over the course of the project so we can save a bunch of time if we do this in the first three months they'll Target need value best time to do it on and they'll even be able to tell you like oh

we can't get to this tool for seven months well that's too late we'll have all the data entered by that point there's no point in making the tool for this project maybe a future project a good value from it but they'll know and that's what a good tech liaison does and that's where sort of this infrastructure design can focus on they're good at being that tech liaison and they're also tools used as documentation and making them do practical examples for example you're making a game where you have spells that blast things forever to have them do tools uses documentation or videos that shows like this is how you would build a simple Fireball this is how you would build a lightning bolt that flies down from the sky and hits targets there's a lot of different things that you could do with this but have them do practical it's not just I here's how you open the editor here's how you open the the data editor no no actually make you know have them do practical demonstrations of how to build things that that would seemingly have a value in the game last year here with growing technical design let's talk a little bit on the gameplay side there's a couple little things here that they can do on the infrastructure level there are Developer maps and developer maps are a type of map that the players do not see but you maintain throughout all of development um they do not go out in external facing

builds but they are always maintained they are free from errors and you use them to sort of test features content new developments Etc however there's a very bad term called test maps and some people say oh this is my test map because I put this together I kick bashed a bunch of art into it it's spewing out errors and I'm going to have to delete it in two weeks when they change a bunch of the art that's not a developer map you're not going to maintain that map that is a temporary map that will be deleted shortly because it's not worth trying to maintain it's too expensive developer maps are maintained maps that are not uh like not shown to an external audience but you do you'll have them forever and they'll survive the the launch of the game and if you go into future games you may even use them on future projects that's a great thing for technical designers to build and own last thing is also is our archetypes prefabs or any kind of like pre-made construction Library piece blueprint whatever the case may be um if you for example want to have like Random Encounters in your game you could have every designer in every unique case script a choice between one to four monsters or if your project supports things like archetypes and prefabs you

can have a technical designer build you a sort of prefab that randomly picks between a set of monsters and so the designers are placing that prefab everywhere and the technicals that are owns that prefab updates it was new monster types comes out maybe removes ones that aren't working and iterates a little bit on that prefab he's not iterating on the level but he is iterating on a piece that's reused in the level that's that great little infrastructural saving and quality improvement that a technical design can add now again infrastructure design so let's move on here now to we got to the last section where we're going to go into multi-class one of the hardest most challenging aspects of sort of being a senior plus to quantify because it breaks a lot of Hearts again so the Grim reality is that there are few opportunities to grow multi-class designers there are usually the sort of result of a need within a project or a team small developers often have it because they realize ah we need a little bit more systems Manpower let's have this content designer levels in or do some systems real quick uh yeah that sounds like a good idea he'll do that for six months or it can become out of very large developers again where

there's a lot of process it's like you know having some versatile people that can do stuff save us from having to uh to like transfer people between strike pods or teams where if we just can have like a guy that can do a bit of systems and a bit of level design on all of our sort of design ones it really saves us a lot of headache on a very large management and so you know there's different opportunities to get there but it's it's hard to necessarily get those sometimes as noted earlier it requires a career change to really grow as a multi-class and to build that versatility it might require you to do a career change for a while which might mean that you have to do a completely different job for a bit there's also Battlefield promotions which I'll talk about in its own little separate section here but let's talk about changing careers for just a second because career changes can be good they can improve happiness of whatever developer even if that means that they're leaving design you know if a designer a level designer says I'd really rather be an environment okay cool let's see what we can make happen you know long term wise that's what's that's what's going to make you into effective seniors that the fact that you will do more environment art and maybe you can assist on the level design side you know you'll have a great unique perspective as an environment artist once you become a good

environment because you'll understand level design you'll understand you know more things about collision and readability and that'll make you an awesome environment it's going to be super effective as an environment because of that but the reality is sometimes if you have to change a career you might have to accept a pay cut and start over at the bottom just because if your company uses say like a one to ten ranking of designers and you were a rank five designer and you decide to go become an environmentalist you might have to start over at a rank one or two environment artist um and that might mean you have to take a pay cut because the it might take you years to get back up to the equivalent of a rank five environmentist to where you finally have that parity where you're sort of an effective staff level at both environmental and at level design even if it's within design you know if you want to go from being assistance designed to a level designer that same thing could happen there might be more translation maybe you go from a you know rank 5 system designer to a rank two level designer because you still have some good design skills that translate over but pay cuts might happen and you might have to be willing to accept that if you really want to change careers and start at the bottom a lot of people once they kind of realize that that's where the dreams of being a multi-class guy because they're just like nope

uh and I want to be multi-class but at the same time I don't want to start over at the bottom or I don't want to take the pay cut but some are some really find out because they got a chance to maybe to test it or do a little bit on their own they explored it somewhere they're like oh this is so much fun and I really want to do it generally speaking I think a lot of people actually move into design because they stumbled into it they did something else they moved on to it they discovered it that way and sometimes you have designers that move between it and they started out of systems and they moved to other things but I once had a level designer that moved into programming um and now they're a programmer they just moved out of design because they really like programming more and that's the way it happens so moving on there let's talk about what I promised was the battlefield promotion so what's the battlefield promotion well that's when disaster strikes and you've lost someone on your team that was important you need to be prepared for that potentially to happen and what to do when you react to it say you have two systems designers and you have a lot of systems that work and then one of them leaves uh your company right before a key Milestone and you need somebody to be able to do some systems designed to work well time for the battlefield promotion you're gonna

take one of your level designers or content designers and move them over because they showed an interest in it or maybe you're going to take one of your QA guys that has some really good system chops because that's never happened in the gaming industry uh uh yeah where you know QA has had to backfill a design position for some reason but that's uh that when that happens if you do go into that have an exit strategy plan make sure that you're thinking about okay we need a systems designer forever for maybe only six months what is it you know time box it sets something up that says like okay for this milestone for this we need a system someone to come in do this sort of like you know data entry in the system side for six months at the end of that um you know where we plan to move that person back to their original we're not going to affect their pay you know it's basically a free chance for them to learn some system and ropes but then they go back to being a Content designer you know and and whatnot and so you need to be honest about careers prospects because if you're doing this with someone that really wants it like they really want to be a system Center or they really want to be a level designer you're giving me a shot at it they're going to want to stay at it afterwards so be real so it's like hey

you know we lost our rank six systems designer he's gone we're gonna bring someone in to do some of the data work but the reality is we're going to continue to try to hire someone to backfill that who is at least a ranked fire rate rank five six or seven is what we're going to be shooting for we think it'll take six to nine months we're happy to give you the opportunity to work as a system designer for say six months maybe up to nine months if things go well but the reality is we are going to look to backfill this position as quickly as possible and bring someone in to do to do that work and at the end of that we want to ensure that you know you'll still have your job when your original field so be honest with that career leaders and people who are trying to go in that who might get a battlefield promotion if they didn't talk to you about an exit strategy you know talk to them about it is it really a permanent change or is it a temporary change because they're willing to look back for it it's not wrong you know just bring it out in the open shed light on that and and get all that stuff out of the gate Innings so that way you know it's like cool I'm getting a chance to work as a system designer for six months or a level designer for two months whatever the case may be that's great I'll take that opportunity so let's summarize a little bit and go through some of these and discuss some

takeaways as we wrap this thing up so act one we talked about designer criteria and tourists kind of go back to these are some of the individual skills and every Studio I recommend if you don't have a quantification of your designer criteria and you're not quantifying skills like items item assignments and the various progression you don't have to use the literacy competency Mastery system that was described you could just do a you know a one through five or whatever the case may be but try to give your designers you know individual skills and I see those IC contribution skills and progress up through it and give them clear targets as they move up the bands within your company and then once they've gotten to a point where they get to the Gap where you know they're starting to get to want to be seniors they want to be able to own features and content they want to be a force multiplier this is where you have to start separating out sort of like the seniors from the non-seniors remember that seniors have to develop those those five new key skills they have to be able to contribute those because those are new skills that are very important and then you also have to separate out is this person going to be a lead or are they not really a people leader and you know maybe they want to be a feature lead or a subdivision lead because they want that agency but let's make sure we

don't put that burden too high hearken back to the burden examples you know my my kind of rough rule is that if someone's not a great people leader try to keep the majority of their work still focused on their areas so don't put a burden on them greater than like 40 or so try to keep it a little bit less than that and they'll probably still be happy if they're spending most their time doing the thing that they still love and then act three growing Force multipliers we talked about those five different things and and kind of why they're a valuable team and a couple of different ways of doing it some will require a little bit more research but a lot of them are specific to your project and a lot of it comes down to finding opportunities for your designers to take risks and grow from mistakes and not blow up the project or Doom it to financial failure in the process so takeaways here let's talk about uh for for senior skills list one more time and then we'll talk about what we hope leads are taking away from this and then hopefully what designers are taking away from this session so we've got ownership and process mentorship and management vision and architecture we've got technical design infrastructure and we've got multi-class that versatility skills so now let's go in and let's talk about the leaders here leaders now let's

discuss ways that you can test skills with your designers and the best way of doing that is to sit down and talk with your designers about the aforementioned skills however those are expressed within your structure you may have slightly different names for them for those roles you know there's some overlap in those you can you can pick them out but talk about it with them and find opportunity opportunities for your prospective seniors or even sometimes your current seniors to test those out you need to create opportunities wherever you can and there are ways of doing that so make sure again you look for ones that won't kill the project they fail don't put big risks on people that you know have don't have proven batting average yet and you know allow for an exit strategy if you're like cool we will spend a week trying this thing and if that doesn't work out we have a backup plan B that we know is or are highly confident will work and then support with resources resist the temptation to try to you know say Hey you know we don't have any programmers right now and I know you really wanted a programmer to do this but we don't have it so maybe you can just do it on your own without a programmer don't you're putting them in

a weird spot you're setting them up to fail don't set people up to fail if something really needs a resource give them that resource so and then quantify what you want for results like say hey we think this will be successful if we accomplish this if you can do it non-binary don't do pass fail be against like okay you know this is like this is a an average result this is a good result and this is the ideal result let's try to at least get a good result and see what we can do and try not to just fail all right and get nothing out of it so and here are some quick ideas for things that you might have within your game that you might not even realize are things that you could be using as training examples uh small features any kind of little optional content if you're working on a game that has 20 hours of content odds are there's some optional content in there that you can use it to help grow your people and uses a chance if you're working on DLC that's an opportunity there too to take a few little risks um and if you're working on things like in a live games events events and live games are fantastic ways to give people chances to grow these skills take a chance allow them to develop that Vision once again those skills that really only

grow through practice Vision being one of them that's a great opportunity to grow that Vision skill when you have those kinds of events and maybe it'll turn in something even greater maybe it'll turn into a mode that people in your game want to play all the time so look out for those opportunities don't let them go to waste and again resist the temptation to make your people leaders be the ones that always do that kind of stuff give chances to seniors and prospective seniors so if your designers fail if they fail because it will happen do not punish the failure unless it is due to gross negligence on the part of the designer there's rare cases but for the most part don't punish them they're probably feeling bad already what's important now is to focus on what you learned what is the retrospective or postmortem um and you may want to do this even if they succeed because it's important they understand why they succeeded they're just like I succeeded because I was very cool uh that's a problem there because they don't really understand why this succeeds and they probably won't be able to repeat that success so do perspectives and and postponents probably even if they succeed and if you get the impression that maybe they didn't quite grasp why they succeeded there so let the whole team learn from it you know Target those

prospection post runs on either larger subsets of designers perhaps everybody you know artist programs the people who are related to it when it goes down and again it's not the punish you're not trying to humiliate designer be like this is how he feels like hey this is the stuff we tried and this is what didn't work out but this is what we learned Aha and expect and actually do better next time you know the point of doing these sorts of prototypes if you give someone a chance and it doesn't result in something valuable for the project they were supposed to have gained experience from it and that experience is supposed to make them better and being able to do it better next time and not repeating mistakes don't if they repeat mistakes then you're having prop and that's we'll go into and we'll talk this is the takeaways focused on designers here listening to this session if your designer trying to make a career out of not being a people leader find Outlets to practice and demonstrate these senior plus skills the ones that you become a Force multiplier the vision the ownership the infrastructure everything we've talked about here you need to find out what's and you need to work on those with your leads but don't expect an instant promotion if you pull off one of those it's just like cool guess what this feature that we did a thing for I was trying to demonstrate a vision I demonstrated Vision now promote me to

senior no no no no it's about the batting average it's about that consistent routine you're going to need a couple of examples and you're going to want to talk about how you did to those examples and what you learned and you might actually have three examples where you all failed but you learned a ton of stuff and maybe the team actually got better and maybe the next project is going to be uh even smoother to do because you're like hey we failed on this but we learned these things we know not to do these things now we know not to do that so you could again that's why it's better to quantify things not as a binary pass fail but as a what did you learn and did you have good results out of it so moving on then remember that these are new skills too as you get to that uh as you get to the Gap and the inflection point you are going to go from being a master at certain things that you are getting good at again using the items example you're really good at making awesome Swords and the players love your swords but you're hitting that diminishing returns curve you know making better swords really isn't helping the team or the project or or the company grow that much more you've got to start developing in new skills that focus more on being a force multiplied multiply the team multiply the project multiply the company do what

you can that's why those ownership Envision all those other skills are focused on exactly that you're gonna have to learn them you're not going to be good at them you've just become a master at something now you got to go back to being a noob again it's frustrating don't get burned out by it and keep practicing at it learn from failure keep trying don't repeat mistakes that is the number one thing that'll get you shut down and you'll lose the Trust In agency that you're hoping to earn as if you repeat mistakes if you're constantly making new mistakes that can be good but try to make big bulks mistakes you make mistakes related together get them all out of the way and then move on to our next one then move on to the next one and eventually you'll stop making mistakes and be super awesome we'll talk a little bit here quickly about one-on-ones and one-on-ones if you're not familiar with the term is usually a conversation that's had between um like a subordinate and their supervisor so like a systems designer has a one-on-one with these with Elite systems designer or the contest I'm going to have a one-on-one with the design lead of the project or maybe you know maybe and also really come but during these use them as an opportunity to discuss your skills both your designer sort of individual skills like

again if you're a guy who makes items rewards talk about how good you are at making items a little bit interesting whereas you can still improve but then as you get close to later levels you're going to want to talk about those senior skills let's talk a little bit if you're under four years though you're mostly going to want to focus on IC schools you've got to get good you're still learning to become that Master you got to develop those things so focus on that talk about them you know talk about the things that you're that you need to learn you want to do to get better at that to become a really good a staff person and then as you kind of get those experience you know you might get a few things thrown your way where you get to work on process or you know you get to do some stuff with vision you get to maybe do a little bit of infrastructure maybe you can even get exposed to some multi-classing around great take that it's like you know cheating and reading ahead in your your school textbooks you're reading ahead in the chapter a little bit but you know don't worry about too much focus on the current chapters right now then when you start getting like the four to six year range that's where you're gonna focus on those senior plus skills that's when you're going to start developing and needing to ask for opportunities and you're probably gonna need to ask for opportunities for the rest of your career this is why it's sort of a long term this is how you grow from being a senior into a principal and at some point maybe an expert again experts

didn't get to be experts because they played it safe but they also didn't get to be experts um because they probably blindly luckily lucky stumbled into it they they developed a series of progressive uh prototypes they enhance their Vision they probably failed at a lot of things you know but they were efficient they managed their time well and they managed to grow into great design as a result so wrapping things up here we're just about out of time now I want to go in I want to do a few special thanks here I interviewed a lot of people and talked a lot of people about the companies and it's not just cryptic Studios that I have to thank for helping me do this presentation but a lot of other designers at other companies and so I'll sell Rife loss on the key people you you got Al we've got Thomas we've got Randy we've got Mark we've got Drew we've got Steve uh Adam and Stephen um and all the designers I've worked with over the past 20 years in particular those people because they sat down and willing to spend dedicated time interviewing me and and talking about their careers and the careers of people around them but all the designers I've worked with over the past 20 years it's been great I I appreciate all of you I hope you forgive me for the mistakes that I made especially since I kind of

skewed towards that people leader track and I always have been a great manager supervisor but it's been a blast and I hope that you all are having awesome careers and hope that you all stick around and develop those long-term Design Careers even if you're not going to wind up being a lead and lastly but not least I want to say special thanks to you for sitting through this presentation um it's been fun to do I've always wanted to do a GDC this is actually a presentation this is actually my first session so if you liked it uh please like And subscribe to my GDC Channel I guess so that's it this is the end of force multipliers long-term Design Careers for non-leads I'm Brett Norton if you want to contact me my work and personal emails are there feel free to ask questions I'm more than willing to gauge if you think cryptic Studios is awesome because I get this great um every uh come talk to me I can give you some more info but again if you have any follow-ups you want to do uh let me know otherwise thank you once again for coming I appreciate it and have a good GBC I hope to see you in person next year

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