So You Want To Be a Game Designer - Career Advice for Making Games - Extra Credits

Every week we are asked the question, "What skills do I need to be a game designer?" This is an incredibly complicated question, one that James has had to wrestle with both vocationally and pedagog- pedagogic- that this word. But this week we're going to try and give you the best answer we've been able to come up with. So, what should you learn if you want to be a game designer? You ready? Everything. Seriously, game design is the art of crafting experiences and you'll find yourself drawing on everything you have. To a great game designer, there is no useless knowledge. But not all of us have the time to learn everything that ever was or will be before starting to design experiences, so what should you focus on? Well, first you can start with a game designer's single most core skill, communication. As you start to build games, most of you will find that you have to work with interdisciplinary teams, teams formed of people with radically different skill sets and backgrounds from you. If you work on video games, you'll have

to work with artists, programmers, designers, producers, sound guys, marketers and business people. If you can't communicate the experience you're trying to design to each of these groups, the quality of your ideas will not matter because these are the people that translate those ideas into an experience that reaches the world. The tricky part here is how different all these people are. I know it's a horrible generalization, but I'm going to say it anyway. Artists and programmers have a totally opposite diametrically opposed way of approaching problems and it's your job to make both of those people share the same vision. Which brings us to our next point and this is extremely important. The game designer is not the same as a director. Your job is not to be a dictator, demanding people to implement your brilliant ideas. Everyone who touches a game influences its design, even if you don't intend for them to. When your programmer writes a physics system, the choices he makes are going to impact the design of the game. Anyone out there who thinks that the designer is the guy who gets to decide what the game is has some serious disillusionment ahead of them before they can excel at this job. Speaking of common misconceptions, here's another important tip. Game design is not the job of creating

fabulous stories or coming up with concepts for games. Concepts are cheap. Every one of you budding designers probably have five or six you could pull out right now. Even if you don't want to get into game design, you've probably come up with one or two game ideas over the years. Hell, I'd be a terrible game designer, but even I can come up with two or three. Not only are game concepts cheap, but they're also pretty meaningless. At the end of the day, the best-selling franchise of all time is about an Italian stereotype and hallucinogens. One of the most lauded concepts of the last few years was first-person shooter Ayn Rand underwater. Go. Real game design is a lot of hard road work, creating systems, mechanics, and levels. Concepts are great, but if that's what you want to do, you probably better find another field. There just isn't any room in the game studio for a specialized idea guy. Every game studio is full of idea guys. I mean, everyone who works there has ideas, good ones. What studios are looking for are people who can make those concepts a reality. Another important thing that every game designer has to learn eventually is that you are the worst judge of your own games, especially early on when you can

justify away the flaws. It's easy to fall into the trap of saying that people just don't get it because they haven't seen the finished product. This is almost never true. Introspection and the ability to take criticism are core designer skills. Don't let yourself get too attached to your ideas because you'll always be wrong. No great game has ever ever sprung fully formed from a game designer's head. Games need players. Players themselves design half the experience as they play. Being able to accept that your idea didn't work, to be willing to give up on that idea you loved so much because it just isn't working, and try something else, these are the hallmarks of a great game designer. Next, game design is a discipline. Just because you've played a lot of games or a whole lot of a specific game does not mean you're prepared to design games. Most of the time, designers don't play games. They study them and analyze them. They deconstruct their systems and test all their breakpoints. A designer will figure out where all the triggers are located and then try and figure out why. They'll reverse engineer the math behind the principal systems. Designers are as fascinated by what makes an experience

unfun as by what makes it fun. Additionally, a game designer must understand the cost of the decisions they make. Whenever you make a decision as a designer, what you're really doing is asking people to do work. That work represents time and money and you have a finite amount of work that will ever be done on your project. Your job as a designer is to ensure the most bang for your buck. I know this may not seem like that big a deal, but trust me, this is the number one cause of failed games. From the giants of the AAA industry to the small fry hobbyist modders, more game projects fail because of teams with a poor sense of scope than any other reason. As a corollary to that point, understand that no game is ever done. Ever. During the process of putting your game together, I guarantee you'll find things you should have done differently and discover countless other amazing things you could do. File those ideas away or at least realize how incredibly expensive it usually is to expand the scope of your game midstream. Remember, at some point you must ship. You can't work on your game forever and you haven't made a game unless people are playing it. On top of all that stuff, here's a list of the many practical skills you'll need

if you want to be a game designer. One, a high-level of technical writing skill. That's technical, not creative writing skill. I'm talking about grammar, spelling, and punctuation here. I'm sure this isn't a problem for most of you, but for some of you, well, like I said, we do read the emails. Two, a solid grounding in logic. Three, some basic psychology. Four, understanding the medium you're working in. You're going to be building electronic games, so learning the fundamentals of how a computer works would be a good idea. Five, a solid grasp of mathematics, at least through advanced algebra. Those skills will prepare you to be a decent game designer. Now, if you want to be a really good game designer, you'll also need one, a thorough knowledge of literature, philosophy, and myth. Two, an understanding of world religions. Three, basic scripting and programming ability. Four, an understanding of art principles. You don't have to be a great artist, but you do need to understand art. If you happen to be able to sketch or throw together a collage in Photoshop, so much the better. Five, an understanding of basic audio design and musical principles.

If you haven't already, go pick up an instrument. It's good for the soul anyway. Six, a practical knowledge of graphic design. Seven, a thorough internal library of games to reference. This is where having played a lot of games will help you. The more games and genres you've experienced, the more you'll have to draw But most of all, you'll need life experience. As a designer, you are crafting experiences. You cannot do this without having some yourself. Knowing all about video games, anime, or the Star Wars expanded universe isn't going to cut it. Go live. A well-balanced, well-examined life will make you a great designer. Last and most obvious of all, make games. If you aren't sure where to begin, you can always start with pen and paper games, things you can put together out of chip and poster board. Or if you're dead set on jumping right into electronic games, we recommend Game Maker for the PC owners, or Game Salad if you've got a Mac. Both of these programs are free, have a low barrier to entry, and will teach you the logic of a computer without expecting you to already have a lot of programming knowledge. Be brave. Be bold. Create. Bring us new experiences and help to

expand the language of games. Good luck, and see you next week.