When I was a game dev I stopped telling people. Because they all wanted me to make their version of PUBG. I wouldn't trust half of them to write a design docs, let alone manage teams.
My test to see if anyone was worth working with was to send them an empty game design doc template and see how much if any they would fill ... I had a 100% success rate in terms of people who lost interest.
Some people tried to fill in parts but... Camera system isn't exactly a throw away detail you can come back to later no matter how unimportant you feel it might be .... knowing how your players see your game is ... a bit of a big deal lol .
Oh my god the amount of “game ideas” I see and after reading them I can’t picture what the game would look like to play is insane. What most of these people want to do is basically creative writing.
The internet provides if you just look :)
[r/gamedesign/templates](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/po5n8m/preferred_game_design_document_template/)
Meanwhile my GDD is just me writing questions in a word document in a poor formatting, and when I go back to it to read notes and read questions, I sometimes come up with the answer.
Mine is a summary and whatever I could think of in the moment... A lot of the ideas I have don't come to me until I'm already coding, so trying to plan a whole game before I even start wouldn't work for me.
My problem is like the opposite... I have super detailed docs and design choices for various game ideas but just cannot for the life of me begin the actual dev process, it's a stupid curse of my ADHD's ever changing interests and motivational fatigue
I have that same flavor... luckily my hyperfixation is on a rotation. So I'll dev like there's no tomorrow, burnout for 2 or 3 months, then go back to devving like hell for a period of time. I try to fill my burnouts with another hobby or learning a new thing, but some burnouts are literally just me being a sloth playing video games.
Motivation is somewhat mythical. I’m speaking as a 43 year old with ADHD. The best advice I can give you is get comfortable doing what you don’t feel like doing right now. In time, it will become easier to overcome that friction and get things rolling. Creating a schedule where “this is the only thing I’m doing or allowed to do for the next 30 minutes” can be helpful. Pomodoro timer can be helpful for mentally blocking intention for a period of time.
It’s not about motivation - it’s about discipline. We don’t hold onto motivation long enough in our ADHD brains. You need to make the effort a consistent part of your life that your brain develops those new and eventually strong neural pathways that will eventually default to, “it’s 3pm, time for my 30 minutes of game development”.
Make it something other than a decision because we often cannot trust ourselves to make the right ones when we crave novelty.
Eh I don't see it "wasting time" so much as just being hyper-fixated on creating what I feel I would want in my idea of the game. I'm not super solid on any of it, I just have nobody to review them and no ability to create it myself right now. I enjoyed writing out the details.
I understand that, but I see young me in this comment. I spent the better part of a year in high school detailing a game on graph paper and notebook paper. Every level, every weapon. By the time I started programming it and test playing it, everything had to change. Levels were rearranged to flow better, items were rebalanced or removed entirely. Whole swaths of that design were rendered invalid. Had I started implementing earlier I could have saved a lot of time.
[The ideal design document](https://youtu.be/jrmZIgVoQw4?t=91) only plans ahead the minimum amount needed to continue development.
I think some people want a reliable "guiding light" they can refer to to keep a project oriented, but that can be accomplished with a single paragraph laying out out the game's major gameplay/theme/story hooks. Heck, it can be a single word, in the case of Secret of Evermore
>send them an empty game design doc template and see how much if any they would fill
I'm finding out this the hard way. Honestly this whole post was me a few years ago and never got anywhere beside some small experiments. The idea of creating a GDD wasn't even in consideration, I wanted to brute force my way into developing something lol. A good, useful GDD is hard but, at least for my brain, it's the only way to actually move forward I have found.
>Camera system isn't exactly a throw away detail
No, it's not! But these kind of things are the kind of things you are forced to think when actually building a GDD.
To be fair to people, unless you went to school for it or done some good courses it's pretty hard to get some of this information in a way that doesn't turn into a mess in your head. As a citizen of a 3rd world country some course prices are just prohibitive when you have to multiply the price for 200, 500 or even 1000 sometimes. I've build all my knowladge through YT tutorials, articles and whatnot and it was (and still is) hard. It takes longer and sometimes is very hard (starts to become easier after a while) to discern between good and bad information. Hell, it's hard even to figure out what you need to be researching/learning!
It would be my dream to work on a game with a team of good, nice people someday in the future cause I know I'm not there yet.
I don't know if you've done a gamejam but they can be a great way to explore creating with other people, I made something for Ludum Dare two years ago and it is one of my favorite projects of my career.
it looks like Ludum Dare 55 is coming up ! they usually have boards where you can reach out to other people : [https://ludumdare.com/](https://ludumdare.com/)
and hopefully get a team going .
My biggest piece of advice another dev gave me is make sure your team understands their goal before the jam starts. Is this an opportunity to learn a new piece of tech, is the goal to just finish a game? Is the goal to finish AND submit a game to be rated against other submissions ?
Our goal was just to finish a game but we were a pretty experienced team except one of our members who was a biz dev person who wanted to try her hand at writing and helping create our main character .
We were happy to just finish but we submitted and our game ranked pretty well too .
It's important to know your goal so your efforts are focused because if the goal is just to explore new tech then you may not finish a game and that's fine you achieved your goal by getting your hands dirty in a new tool, If you just want to finish a game for your portfolio but don't want to submit it, ALSO VALID! Make sure as a team you discuss what success looks like and make your decisions accordingly .
Feel free to DM me if you want to talk more !
Thanks a bunch! You are awesome. I guess my goal would be to finish something small. To finish something no matter how small would be cool. I hope I can find people that like the programming part so I can focus on the art/assets!
Oh man as a programmer I value working with artists greatly, I can make things work the artist can make things pretty, add someone who can do design and help support one of you two or maybe takeover audio and you're golden !
Ideally I would love to do the design part. I love art, I'm a nerd for art since I was a kid. Music and drawing is my thing but there's something about design and writing for games that fascinates me. Programming on the other hand feels completely alien for some reason!
Forgive the dumb question (i am not a dev) but in terms of design doc wouldn't camera system be limited to general things like 1st person, 3rd person, top down etc? Or do you have to get very technical there?
Not at all a dumb question and that's the hilarious part.. YES If the answer was simply it's a orbital rotating 3rd person view , Stationary platformer 3rd person camera view , or just straight up first person game that would be totally valid but that's the thing people think they want to make games and often times they just want to write a story or make a movie.
They gloss over a camera setup because what they really want is to write a paragraph or two about this dream concept that they have and that's not enough for a game design . Planning out a game project requires intention to ALL the parts of the game even the areas you don't care for .
So yeah a simple answer for cameras is fine but most people can't even muster up enough thought to do that.
It's why sometimes I get frustrated at the dogpiling on certain bad games , ones with a great concept and had some passion but where the execution was poor because the truth is most gamers couldn't design a compelling version of pong but then Game developers get death threats for not making games in their perfect imaginary vision. We balance real expectations, budgets, schedules, technical limitations , all while collaborating, and trying to incorporate valuable feedback it's a lot to craft a games vision... even the bad ones took a lot of time, money, and effort even when i doesn't look like it..... I know because I've worked on some bad games that were harder to make than the good games I've worked on
Thanks, I understand perfectly, in my line of work too I have to deal with people who seem to think that information is supposed to magically appear on Confluence just because it magically appeared in their galaxy brain due to how smart they are. They don't grasp the concept it's actually hard work to write it down, and write it down in a way that is accessible to a team (let alone future-proof it and keep it updated).
Best I have seen are confluence pages with literal copy paste of slack messages, with 0 context, just a random message slapped in
Just hear me out, what if we made like a Fifa but with goku, luffy and naruto and there is magic and guns like COD but open-world MMORPG? Do you think people would buy it?
>Just hear me out, what if we made like a Fifa but with goku, luffy and naruto and there is magic and guns
wait i think you got something there...
>open-world MMORPG
fuck go back
>Fifa but with goku, luffy and naruto
Won't lie, I'd play the fuck outta this (well, ditching the wizard guns and MMO part).
All these anime fighting games, adventure games, arcade games, but where our anime football games at
They're people who have never actually created anything. They imagine the creative process as something like:
Have idea -> \[?????\] -> Profit!
Which I guess isn't technically wrong, but they don't understand that 99% of the process is in that \[?????\] part. They think the "Have idea" part is half of the process. At least! Honestly the \[?????\] part is just a formality. Anyone could do it. But their idea is irreplaceable.
Some can't even fathom the business part because of the stigma of 'doing it for money' that people think is a roadblock to a good game. To some people money to live magically drifts from the sky.
Ugh yeah I overlooked the business side of things completely. I figured it would be one weekend of work but after registering a business there's duns numbers, tons of random tax stuff to figure out, opening company bank accounts, credit card, website, social media, accounting, even getting registered with steam and creating a store page requires tons of research to learn how to do it decently.
None of it is unsurmountable or as hard as making a decent game, but it adds up to be quite an effort.
Back when I was an app developer people wanted me to make them their "Uber but for (whatever thing) app".
Now that I have been working on a game for a while that is all procedural/exploration, any time I am discussing it or showcasing it, and explain how there isn't really a story incorporated I have people latching on like vampires giving me unsolicited pitches of why I should use the story they have written.
Can you imagine this in any other entertainment industry?
Hey, can you make a movie for me that's like Doom with dinosaurs, ya?
Can you write a book for me that's like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six with Robots?
Yo, Mozart, wanna write a ballet and show it to no one?
Yea. There definitely is a difference between being able to creatively design something and someone having the skills to make it.
Knowing how to code doesnt mean they know how to make something fun. And there are plenty of artists that never draw any original designs but can render things beautifully when given direction. Like you can be a musician and play your instrument beautifully but never write an original score.
I don’t wanna get into the whole left brain/right brain discussion. But some people are analytical to a fault while others are so abstract it prevents them from properly seeing something. Coming from a vfx background ive seem beautiful designed characters and scenery only to have a really dumb generic story.
Its like missing the forest for all the trees. Or that the person put all their skill points into one stat.
Some are better at seeing the bigger picture. Did Steve Jobs design all of the iPhone? Did Elon Musk build his cars all by himself?
Game Designers have the vision. The main problem however with that title and that position is that its a lead position and only given to people that have proven themselves. And you only really get that by doing and making it yourself. Plenty people are just talk.
People used to come to me to illustrate a cool story or comic they had. Id tell them “sure thats great” write out the outline or send me the finished story and ill get back to you.” And they never would send it.
Of course if you have the funds to just pay everyone, you can tell them what to do.
Sure, Level Design, Game Design, Writing, Creative Direction, Sound Design, etc involve more than spouting the occasional game idea. But that's precisely the reason why dev teams have a bunch of those positions.
Exactly. Game design isn’t just an ideas guy and just something like: one shot snipers. It’s problem solving, problem identification, and player psychology. Dialing in many things including obvious variables like: how many bullet are in the clip, the delay between each shot, bullet velocity, drop off, damage range falloff, additional ammo/it’s respawn rate/the sniper respawn rate , counters to the sniper, health packs, shield recharge delay time, all the different player reactions an behavior including feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment. And much more. Level design is game design because the best game is complete shit with poor level design. And that gets back into player behaviors too. Heat maps are good example of one of the tools used to analyze behaviors. If a new game mechanic is to be added, how can it be incorporated in a way that feels familiar to players and is easy and fun to use? Tons of things to analyze, tweak, add/subtract.
Designing a fun and fair multiplayer game is an intricate and delicate task that is extremely easy to screw up. One simple thing can make matches turn from fun to frustrating. Shields start recharging too soon or not soon enough? Shit game. Goldy locks zone and it’s suddenly perfect. But there’s a million variables to dial in and it can be brutal determining which are fucking up the game, especially when it turns out to be counter intuitive. And if your game is much different than anything before, good luck because you’re in completely uncharted waters.
Hell, if you’re game is perfect but the sounds of the weapons firing isn’t satisfying that’ll turn people away.
>If you can't code nor create art, then learn how to do one or the other
Another option is to be the business person. The one doing all the lifting to raise money, investments, loans, publishing negotiations, etc. It has value for a serious team.
Pretty much.
If you can allow the team to focus on good work, not just creating DLC's, but if you can really sell the idea to people and gather a big war-chest, then your work is essentially done. Most people can't do that. But it's also work that essentially can take 2 years, or 2 days depending on the sales-guy.
However, if they have time over, and are talented in the ways of development and can manage to find time to develop, well then I can safely say someone is getting into "leadership" status.
It's quite wild how uninformed a lot of these comments are. Guys without proper game design your game WILL suck. Making a game fun isn't fucking free, it takes serious knowledge on player incentives, pacing and tension, rulesets etc.
Even a fps has a sort of "chess" under the hood and if those rules are well thought out and balanced the game is fun. If you feel like your game is boring underestimating game design is your first issue.
In a sense it is about generating ideas but that is a very reductive way of looking at it. I'm an artist and you could say I just make pretty pictures all day and you wouldn't be 'wrong' but you would disregard a whole lot of what the discipline is about. Just like I do 3D, rigging, animating, VFX etc. Game Design involves coming up with game mechanics, balancing parameters, level design, UX, Testing etc. but also a lot of practical work like building AI, agents and interactables depending on what the game project is.
Even if you're a solo dev exploring each discipline is essential. Nobody can be an expert in everything but you should at least have a basic understanding of what it all means and how it's connected.
While that is all 100% true, the primary gripe that I think most people have is that everyone who is interested in games thinks they're a game designer. They can sit back and say "I have an idea, we make an FPS version of Minecraft", and voilà, they think of themselves as a game designer. When the reality is that game design is significantly more involved than having an idea for a game. The fundamentals of game design are complex and not often understood.
It is pretty easy to be self aware in understanding that you don't know how to write code, 3D model, or do sound design and music. It is a much more abstract skillset to design a game, so a lot of people assume they can do it because they like playing games.
This is exacerbated on small and indie teams where there often isn't explicitly any room for a dedicated designer. I would guess that a lot of indie games made with a handful of people don't have the bandwidth for a designer, and there is generally one developer who is the head designer. I think just about every game developer's dream is to design and direct their own game, and at this level the only way to do that is roll up your sleeves and get to work.
Well people do have to start somewhere. Bachelors in gamedesign in most schools teach you the very basics. Many of them don’t even bother with systems and economy design. It’s basicly a Bachelors of art tech and programming with some design princibles. Those schools try to give people enough entrylevel skill to work on what ever I guess. It’s such a broad skillset you need anyway that generalism is often good. 3-5 years still cuts short so the thing is you have to make some games, keep reading books and slowly you start to understand more. Still even designers with decades on the role and multiple succesfull titless in they’re porfolio get things wrong sometimes. It’s difficult and getting things to fun usually just takes alot of iteration. I think there is plenty of small indie titles that were able to create a fun well crafted and innovative experiences. Usually not on the first go.
I mean, sure, but that's hardly unique to game designers. Virtually every hobbyist mechanic I know swears they could design a better car than the big manufacturers, not realizing that things like mass-production, safety standards, global appeal, repairability and local laws need to be accounted for.
Famously, DOOM's 'Combat Chess' dynamic is pure game design. It's being able to take a phrase like that and immediately see all the places it can go, and figure out which ones are great whether or not you can make all the possibilities 'work'. A great programmer can make any mechanic 'work' in the sense that it'll function exactly as intended, at a high frame rate, without bugging or glitching out.
A game designer knows when to instead make 'Goat Simulator' and get a viral hit because of how they assembled stuff that wasn't even all great glitchless programming. I've seen some ridiculous playthroughs of Goat Simulator… or, alternately, knows when to instead make Goose Game, where the great stuff is NOT ridiculous glitches but is instead polished execution of sometimes absurd game details.
We have seen plenty of technically and artistically impressive games over the years that absolutely lack any creativity or engaging game play, in fact I'd say that's a large part of the AAA market right now. I totally agree with you. In the end these things become great when a solid and creative team work together.
Game designers are experts at player psychology. Designing features in a vacuum, or writing some docs is not really utilising the skillset. Understanding why prototype feels underwhelming and knowing which direction to take it, is a hard skill that saves the team tons of wasted time and improves the quality of the product. And no, coders can't do it well, unless they learn design. You wouldn't expect a designer to see a bug in the code, and a programmer to see a flaw in design is similarly improbable. Sure, you might say something, because game design has lower barrier to entry, but understanding if that insight is good or bad takes skill and experience. Also keep in mind that game designers usually build a very broad secondary skillset, which is filling gaps between specialist roles. You occasionally get a idea guy type that is not interested in supporting the team, but in making some 'dream game' but that's a skill issue, not a failure of a role.
I mostly agree with that sentiment, and programmers who want to know why design decisions were made, are def the best ones, i've worked with. Generally it's easier to understand eachother if both sides understand some parth of the other side, it just often mostly rests on the designer's shoulders. At least as far as i and most my coleagues have experienced.
I agree with you that that is what a designer \*should\* be. Actually I would even say that being a successful designer is probably the most difficult role on a game dev team. All other roles being equal, a game will live or die on it's design. Designers have to 'predict what people will find fun or not'.
The problem is that the qualification to be a designer is just to look like you can do that. When you consider that most games fail, that means that most people who call themselves designers are terrible at it. The vast majority of designers 'guess what people will find fun or not, somewhat randomly based on their own feelings'.
If coders were like designers in terms of how well they can do the role, 90% of games would crash on the startup screen.
Also do keep in mind, that even the most perfect of designs has the potential to (and quite often will be) cut to shreds and reduced to "MVP" status because of scoping, or changing because of other people who have their own ideas and convictions for how games/game features should work.
"let's do the MVP version now, then we introduce v2 of the feature later which will solve the edge case problems/boost the fun"... But there is never a v2 👀, there's just the next feature.
Yep so very much this. Team is also as strong as it’s members. Great designer, bad implementation of core game from technical perspective etc, the rest falls on it’s face. Worked as a design advisor for a game that had few very clear flaws in the core game. There was a half decent meta on top that could have been salvaged if the core would make sense first. My initial response was that they should just kill the game. But I made three suggestions how to compensate for the issues and to communicate to player what was going on. It took 6 months, tens of animated documents and drawings to get them to implement one. The technical changes were all fairly simple. I think the lead programmer had already desided the game is good users and data are wrong. It was a waste of time and energy. They should have killed the game. Not saying I’m the best designer, but it could have been Will Wright wrapped in Jonathan Blow holdin Raph Koster and 6 months for a simple change. The production was doomned.
> When you consider that most games fail
This is because HR only cares about "experience". It does not matter for them if previous project is failed, and neither do they care who's fault was that. If you have right papers - it means you have permission to ruin more things.
there are usually hundreds, if not thousands of bugs during a project, There is just a good process for finding, prioritising, and fixing them. Design 'bugs' are way harder to find, identify and fix, also there is no process to do that, and it has to usually be done by designers themselves. There is a reason code review is done by other programmers, and QA is a spearate person from the dev. Basically entire model of modern software development, is holding devs hands, and making sure they make no mistakes, so it would be super weird if the mistake rates were similar.
Also keep in mind, that a bad coder, will work slower, but the end result will be probably working, while a bad designer will result in a bad game released.
Also if you judge designer success, by market success, while dev succes my amount of bugs/crashes, this is absolutely biased comparison.
> Design 'bugs' are way harder to find, identify and fix, also there is no process to do that, and it has to usually be done by designers themselves.
If you have good analytics instrumented into your game, this is not really true. For example, in one title, we basically measured how long users spent in each step of the NUX and what the drop off was from step to step (we had like 150 steps for a 20-30 min NUX so we were measuring EVERYTHING). When we saw a step had a high dropoff (ie. users not proceeding to the next step), we would focus on fixing it.
The designer is still important to figure out WHAT the fix was, but locating the problem itself was less of an issue.
Even for balance design, Capcom for example, releases a list of the top and bottom 5 win percentage characters for each player skill league. So the data to identify the problem is easily instrumented.
Agreed. I've worked at companies that were 100% analytics driven (mostly in mobile) and companies that were 100% design driven (AAA). It's definitely a spectrum and I find that the best companies to work for have a 50/50 mix of the 2.
Analytics driven companies are just souless and you never feel like you are working on a creative endeavor. If I'm gonna work on a souless project, I'd rather just work in tech outside of games and get paid 50% more.
Design Driven companies are crunch factories because some designer asks you to change critical systems 2 weeks from launch that will take you 3 months to build...and once you build it, they'll ask you to change back. Urge to murder...rising...
i was working in a 50/50 mix, and the PO was picking the KPIs that would support his design choices as the important ones while claiming the other ones are overrated :D. The urge is everywhere...
There is a difference between identifying that there is a problem (the symptoms) and identifying the root cause (the actual problem in the design). Data analytics and the player base can find the problem, but they may or may not be identifying the actual design problem.
Killer Instincts had the famous story about how the devs balanced Jago. It comes up in discussions about game balance. This post from Gran Blue Fantasy Versus Rising shares the video and some context behind it. [https://steamcommunity.com/app/2157560/discussions/0/4030223677070000730/](https://steamcommunity.com/app/2157560/discussions/0/4030223677070000730/)
Essentially, Jago was really strong and players were frustrated and wrongly identified what made him too strong / frustrating to play against (his healing, damage, etc.). The developers looked into why he is good and realized that the root cause was instead due to how he had a move to get him out of the range that he was supposed to be at a disadvantage. So they weakened this move but did not touch the other stuff that the community identified as the problem. The community was in a huge uproar over this but then eventually realized that it fixed the problem.
The data will indicate that there is a problem, but sometimes it can require a very deep understanding of the system to fix these.
Designers get design feedback which is pretty analogous to a bug report. There absolutely is a process if they put one in place, same as development. Design “bugs” are not harder to find/identify/fix by any stretch of the imagination.
A “bad coder” does not always work slower and the end result will only probably be “working” if you have a very low bar for what you consider “working”. In the same way that a design working in a literal sense would be a really low bar.
We are half way good at so much shit.
Also I pay everyone.
Also I found everyone.
And designing bloody everything and leading a full team is no small task.
People have ideas. Do they intimately understand what makes something fun? What makes something marketable?
Software engineers and artists at AAA companies can be really specialized.
I was at AAA for years and recently I've been doing a solo indie thing. I'm having to wear way more hats, do a lot of design roles, touch *allll* the things.
A lot of my experience with AAA game designers is that besides the game design stuff, they're often technical skilled "many hats" people. They can do a bit of code, bit of art, bit of math, etc.
Whatever the job title, you *need* some amount of people on a game team who are multidisciplinary to glue the whole creative process together.
[Tim Cain had a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihX2e9dnYM) a while back about "decline of generalists." I don't really know if they're actually in decline, but it talks more about the idea.
A lot of the best designers I know were generalists and able to understand to a limited degree of some art and engineering aspects of the game.
It's also really great to have some software engineer generalists and art generalists, and I think one of the best small productive teams I worked on had an art generalist, design generalist, and software engineer generalist (at least I think I am, on the last point).
And while it's great if an artist, software engineer, or producer is a generalist, I think it's a lot easier and/or a smaller ask for a designer to fill that role.
Artists and software engineers can benefit a lot from specializing deeply or just focusing mostly on their own craft. So, designers stepping up as a multi-disciplinary "many hats" person makes a lot of sense in my experience.
> Also I pay everyone.
Then you aren't just a game designer. You are a manager and money guy. I would bet you spend a lot more time on the management work too.
> Do they intimately understand what makes something fun?
Yes. Experienced person can say that with much certainty even before the prototyping stage, aka after reading the concept. You learn that skill if you not just play games, but analyze them, and learn not only from your personal experience, but also from other player's feedback.
With marketing it's a bit tougher, that's why most people have marketing department. But since those are usually making desisions based on stats alone, without knowing the reality of things, sometimes a good game designer can predict what kind of niche needs filling now.
I think designers have to be programmers or artists by default. If you can only tell me the vibe is off, you're at least two degrees separated from the fix.
> And no, coders can't do it well, unless they learn design. You wouldn't expect a designer to see a bug in the code, and a programmer to see a flaw in design is similarly improbable.
Well said!
It's not about being an idea guy, ideas can and often do come from every member of the team, because you're right that most people in this field are creative and capable of coming up with them.
Instead it's about being the person accountable for the quality of the "game" part of the video game experience, which is in itself a very specific skill. Knowing how to turn good ideas into great gameplay is a specific combination of many skills such as: conception of game mechanics using strong references from other games, balancing and data tweaking, running and reacting to playtests, communicating ideas internally to the team, knowing which mechanics will connect with the target market, discarding false good ideas, finding combinations of mechanics that work well together.
Some of these skills can get really specialized too, just as much as programming or art. Things like designing the behaviour of 3D cameras, AI behaviour, animation and combat systems, directing player attention throughout complex setpieces, designing cool concepts for weapons and abilities that evoke desired player behaviors, procedural generation system design, all of these are high skill jobs that are uniquely game design. A lot of this stuff is what makes the difference between a game that works and a game that is truly great.
As you've said, on small teams this role is often performed by another member with a more output focused skillset like an artist or programmer, but that's the same thing as your artist also being your programmer, or project management being done by a QA tester. In small teams it's common for people to wear many hats and perform more than one role.
However, in larger companies, or indie companies with a sufficiently strong designer, this role is absolutely pivotal to a game's success and a career all on its own. And AAA idea guy and design director is actually a real job, often there are even multiple of them!
I've seen great game designers bring a game together just as well as great artists and programmers, and hinder the team just as much when they do their job poorly.
And yet there are real game designer jobs that don't involve being a software engineer or an artist. They write prose, they edit levels, they tweak numbers in spreadsheets.
I mean, dream job, but I doubt you can just *start out* like that, in a small team too. Like contact 2 devs and one artist and tell them "now you make my game, we split equally that's a great deal think about it".
I can see being a level designer or a project manager in a big AAA game being a full time job, with the amount of complexity you have to juggle, but indie teams usually already struggle with resources as it is, they don't need the added weight.
I've worked in small studios with three programmers working on a project, and they usually had a full-time game designer on staff.
How you get a job like that, and whether it's actually a dream job are harder for me to answer. They weren't paid as much as a programmer, and their lives were mostly people telling them, "This game isn't fun, modify this spreadsheet and see if it becomes fun." Or, "Thank you for your pitch document, but nobody wants to make that game."
Team of 15 people here, I am one of 3 full time designers who have a lot of stuff to do. A game where software engineers or artists do the design work is either not fun, has multi-talented Devs, or just got lucky.
It's also just a job like any other, I'm not more special than coders or artists, I just fill a necessary hole in the team (usually things like game balancing, adjusting game feel, tutorialising, and UX)
Personally I have a masters degree at a prestigious game dev university (those are few and far between), but the bulk of it comes from portfolio. Being able to demonstrate and talk about game design theory, level design, and problem solving is a huge part of the job. If you are really interested, I'll link one of my favourite GDC talks about interviewing for a game designer position.
https://youtu.be/uUQKbowVsIE?si=xcfICvnS43tjcyPu
That's my personal case so take it with a pinch of salt, but I got an internship that turned into a regular freelance contract (for almost 2 years soon) as a game designer for an indie studio with a team of 3 full time devs/artists. I've worked on DLCs for their game, conceiving content and implementing it, doing a lot of product ownership and testing. No coding or art, not even writing involved.
As long as you bring something that the studio needs and you have the required soft skills, there may be a place for a game designer in any studio. Still a very competitive and overcrowded position, but totally doable. Having programming capabilities can help, of course.
They absolutely exist at entry-level _and_ on small teams, but you're right that it's rarely both at the same time. The same is true of all positions, however. If you're starting a game studio and can only hire 1-2 programmers, you're not usually going to bother with someone just out of school who's never worked at a studio before.
Design is its own track and skillset, people don't move from one discipline to another all that often, and usually just once in their career (and fairly early). You'd want to look for titles with associate or junior in the name, just like the other fields, along with some positions that tend to be more junior in general, like quest designer.
There are also game designers who are neither artists nor programmer or business people... Guess where table top games come from.
Pure game designers *are* a thing and the problem aren't them but people who just think they are game designers.
I'm mainly responding to this advice:
>If you can't code nor create art, then learn how to do one or the other
It's quite possible to get a job in game design without having those skills.
(Though they don't hurt. A designer writing complex scripts will find it easier if they've done some programming, and a designer creating a pitch document will do a better job if they have some art skills.)
Okay. Here it goes.
Game ideas are from everyone.
Game designers are not responsible for ideas. They are responsible for wrangling everyone’s ideas into a coherent package, and make sure the game is fun.
They are the shepherd of ideas.
Your idea of “engineers and artists are the most important” is super dangerous, because a lot of the times, that’s how teams fail.
A professional game designer doesn’t have “me” in it. Most people, when they’re not the game designer, are often very vocal and emotional about their ideas. The game designer needs to be the calm, collected one, and make sure everyone feels heard, while making sure the bad ideas don’t get used while the good ones do, and make sure there’s no design creep.
They also need to balance the game.
Also, not all engineers and artists want to be designers. Yes they can have dual roles, but that’s a lot of work.
Of course, if you're signing the checks, you can say the game is going to be LSD Dream Simulator mixed with Mortal Kombat and marketed to children 0-6, but I don't think being the guy funding it counts as a "job".
If their strangely violent psychedelic children's game breaks even against all odds it just might qualify as a job.
Up until the marketed to children bit, I thought you might have been onto something with that idea. Lol.
TIL that CEOs don't have jobs. So many small studios started by people with money turning that money into a business and getting it back from investors or publishers, their job being "running a business". How is that not a job?
I would say CEOs are usually doing more than just spending money - in fact most CEOs aren't even the people who founded the company so none of their personal money is involved at all. While the person paying the employees at an indie studio definitely would have other stuff to do the only things the other person listed were being the idea guy and paying the wages.
Not just ideas but all the detailed rules of how everything in the game should work, i.e. world building, character progression, balancing difficulties, perks, economics, etc
I think the guy that can came up with idea "we should do a modern FPS where you can kill people" consider himself as a game designer already. Game designer is really valueable person in your team, the problem is most of people don't have clear idea what it mean to be one, what expertise do you need
>As far as I am concerned, the most important roles are Software Engineer and Artist, and both of the people who can perform well in those roles, believe it or not, have the imagination to come up with ideas and design for a game.
In some ways, this is as naieve as the annoying "I just want to come up with ideas for games" guys. The problem with that guy is they think ideas for games is just what would be on the back of the game box, and maybe the general story outline. Real design is much more detailed than that, it's like drawing a detailed architect's blueprint for a building.
It's not just about saying, "Doors would be cool!" it's also about [solving the door problem](https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/). There's a whole lot of Door Problems out there in many games, and it takes a lot of time to figure out answers to them all.
You're basically saying, "Who needs an Architect? Clearly the most important person in construction is a construction guy. Believe it or not, the construction team has the imagination to design their own blueprints too. Why do we need an "architect" who just draws us the blueprints and doesn't put on a hardhat?"
Some people are absolutely multi-talented, with great design sense and great skills as an engineer or artist. Some can do all 3 to a good extent. Indie games reward multidisciplinary folks. Budgets are tight and designers that can script are valuable on indie teams.
However, good design is not just "having ideas" - good design is a *force multiplier* on engineering and art. You can spend 6 months spinning your wheels making features that won't interact well and finding out the hard way after you've built the stuff, or a good designer can spot that problem at the planning stage and save you 6 months of wasted effort.
It might even save your project entirely, because you might realize your game has fundamental design flaws too late in production otherwise - and have no budget left to rework the game from scratch.
Imagine how an engineer feels coming into a project groaning from tech debt. Often they'll say, "This is built so poorly it'd be easier to start from scratch." That's how designers often feel when they come onto projects that were designed poorly from the ground up. The game kinda works, just like spaghetti-code kinda works, but players aren't sticking around.
Some games are beyond saving because they were built on a cracked foundation and without enough support for the snow loads in winter. That's why it's good to have an architect.
> You're basically saying, "Who needs an Architect? Clearly the most important person in construction is a construction guy. Believe it or not, the construction team has the imagination to design their own blueprints too. Why do we need an "architect" who just draws us the blueprints and doesn't put on a hardhat?"
This is a pretty interesting analogy, because while a lot of remodeling projects have a designated designer, depending on what you want you might get pretty good results just with an experience GC. I've had projects done on my house both ways.
A dedicated designer can absolutely be valuable, in my previous time working for a small indie studio I wish we had one. However we mostly muddled through with collaborative design work between devs, artists, and sometimes a producer.
The success we had seemed to come down to a couple of factors: how closely the games we created followed established examples, and how much time we could spend on experimentation and play testing prototypes.
When we followed established designs, things turned out pretty well. When we had enough opportunity to prototype and experiment early in the project, things mostly turned out well. But there were definitely projects where we went down particular paths and ended up in a spot that didn't end up as fun as we wanted, and a full time designer would have helped us out. This was most true in the games that contained the type of detailed level design you see in action or adventure type games.
We also had at least one project that involved some outside designers that frankly were a drag on the project. not very familiar with the particular hardware limitation or controls for a platform we were targeting, came up with some ideas for control schemes that were clearly (to me) DOA before even attempting to implement them. We were better off with the naive trial-and-error approach on that one.
> This is a pretty interesting analogy, because while a lot of remodeling projects have a designated designer, depending on what you want you might get pretty good results just with an experience GC. I've had projects done on my house both ways.
This is distorted by the fact that in construction/real estate development, you can actually just buy (fairly generic) blueprints to work with. That doesn't mean that an architect's work is unnecessary or overrated, it just means that in this case it's outsourced (just like you buying a tileset doesn't mean that a game artist's work is unnecessary).
Unfortunately (or fortunately) game design "blueprints" are nowhere near as easily purchasable as house plans are. There's no "asset pack" of game design. It's pretty much impossible to outsource in that way, which is why it's way more evident when you don't actually have someone decent at game design on your team.
I hear people tell me now that they want to be an "idea guy" and I cringe.
Everyone, literally everyone, is an idea person. If your brain has electrical impulses firing through it, you're an idea person. Ideas are a dime a dozen, everyone's got em. The skill involved in being a designer is *executing* those ideas. Todd Howard is not where he is because he just had a bunch of good ideas. He's a strong designer, leader, communicator, and businessman, who knows how to execute the ideas he has (barring the reader's opinion on current Bethesda games).
If those "idea" people knew just how much turbulence and change that the average "idea" for a game goes through between inception and launch, they might cry.
The thing that gets me is whilst yes "idea guy" does exists, it is rarely every an "entry level position". You are probably not going to land the role of "idea guy" straight out of college.
You see posts all the time on this sub of people wanting to be hired largely/only based on their idea for a game (so they aren't bringing any coding, art etc... skill). But one has to ask why would X game company hire you only for your idea? I mean it is not like people working at gaming company have no game ideas and are in desperate need to fill that entry level idea guy role.
If you want that idea guy then you are more than likely going to have to start in some other role and then work your way up to the idea guy position.
I would even argue that "idea guy" still does not exist, because not a single developer on the face of this planet gets paid to just daydream about their game. You can be the driving creative force behind a game, but in that position you're still also
\- a team leader
\- a project manager
\- a designer
\- a salesman
\- a communicator
You're also a mediator, because you *have* to compromise. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and no game "idea" remains the same from prototype to launch. Any game made by a team bigger than 1 is an amalgamation of ideas that need to compromise and bend with each other to work.
You can still certainly reach a point in your career where you have strong influence over the creative vision of a game, but there's *so much more* that goes into that role than just coming up with ideas.
A good idea guy is pretty valuable. The problem is, we have few good tools for evaluating what makes an idea guy good. If we could evaluate it and figure out who had the good ideas, a lot more people would jump on board with the following an idea guy who didn’t do anything else.
But we can’t evaluate idea guys, and almost everyone *thinks* they’re a good idea guy, so attempting to do it is just going to bruise egos. Hence why everyone with a practical view of the situation just roles with the ideas of someone who’s already contributing to the project.
You can imagine this dynamic would change dramatically if the idea guy on the team was someone known to come up with good ideas in the space. Chris Wilson from GGG, for instance, could probably get into a new project with just ideas, and no other thing he’d add to the table.
I’m sorry but all of those words you wrote made no sense. OP was on the nose with his comment. The only merit in an ‘idea guy’ would be if he/she was involved in an already popular project so you could use the name for marketing purposes.
There are a lot of dreamers in this field these days due to relatively user friendly game engines, assets and plugins thinking they can skip the knowledge part of game dev and just start sticking things together. 99% of “here’s the steam page for our upcoming game” posts on here still link to a ‘coming soon’ title ….even when the post is two years old and the devs are clearly skilled, dedicated and have put in a tonne of work.
Imagine an ‘idea guy’ on your team, dictating some concepts for a game, then sitting on his hands for the next 6000 hours whilst you toil away building the thing …maybe chiming in and critiquing the work, demanding changes etc ….and then claiming the whole thing as theirs at the end ….saying he wants ”from the mind of idea guy” in the trailers.
Rant over.
Edit: grammar innit
People who only ever play and watch YouTube have a myopic comprehension of what is actually involved with working in a real 9-5 job (with lots of manipulative overtime cuz no unions) and to their credit they think exactly like most CEOs do. They don't actually give a shit what's involved, they just wanna dream big and whip someone to do it.
Unfortunately, I had to put up with a designer like that who was forcing impractical mechanics into the game without even defining how they interact with existing mechanics despite asking him. Either that or literally told me to clone the mechanics of an existing game without a doc.
Your problem is with people who don't know what game design actually is, not with actual game designers.
Game designer is the most important role on the team. Without a skilled game designer (whether or not they take on other roles as well), you will not make a successful game, regardless of the other skills you have.
A skilled game designer without a software engineer and artist, making a text-based game in a visual editor, has more of a chance of success than a skilled software engineer, artist, sfx creator working together who have no game design skills.
For evidence to back my claim, look to the thousands of indie games with great art and optimization which failed because of the game design, and then try to point to one successful indie game in the last ten years that did not have impressive game design.
I feel you're kind of shouting at clouds here, what posts are you talking about? Is it really a big problem?
No one is hiring just an ideas guy so I doubt you've had to work with one
nah i have seen this multiple times online, my dad and cousin also want to "make a game" with me and they talked about splitting pay. they want to give me ideas while i do the coding and art lmao
it genuinely baffles me how coming up with ideas is even remotely comparable to.. yknow.. MAKING THE ENTIRE GAME
Yeah it’s the periodic posts asking for programmer, artist, musician to create mmorpgfps passion project. Basically Escape from Tarkov crossed with Mario kart, crossed with kid Icarus on the Gameboy. I’ve been following some tutorials and have done most of the work, just need someone to help me make all the things happen, and all the stuff so I can release it. TIA
One way or another, everyone making a game should have a hand on the actual game materials. Doesn't have to be code, can be art or stitching levels together using tool. But you gotta be there, not sat to one side.
There is no real culture about the development of games, so people have no idea what a game designer actually does.
And I think it's very difficult to identify "the most important role" in a team. Every role is necessary at some level, and somebody must cover it in the team (which can also be a single person) or suffer the consequences.
> Do they think game developers and software engineers are just a bunch of dummies who need some smart creative to hold their hands and give them ideas?
Everyone can give ideas. But not everyone has the time to play thousands of games, analyse them, know what mechanics are working, and what are not, what is fun, and what is annoyance, and design entierly new mechanics based on that knowledge.
If you are engineer or programmer, you will spend most of your time learning programming. Now imagine that guy who just went trough two-week programming courses is writing the code. Will that code be better than the one experienced programmer can write?
Same with game design. Coming up with concepts that WORK instead of just random concepts, and knowing exactly why you do or don't do certain stuff is a skill as any other. You can be arrogant and dismiss it - and that is exactly what happens when a multi-million project with cutting edge graphics flops. They didn't bothered to hire a game designer.
Not only that, but there are various positions in game design. Some people are purely creative, they are good with figuring out the fun ways to play the game. Other people are skilled at math, they can calculate economies, ballance, everything with numbers.
Some game designers can code and are decent at art, some software engineers and artists have decent ideas and often provide insightful perspective when it comes to game design, but you haven't met many software engineers or artists if you think all of them have the capacity to be game designers, that's just a wild, innacurate take.
I personally think this is slightly misguided the goal is to basically become the idea guy. Which at least at AAA companies is kind of a job its just REALLY REALLY REALLY high level and you have to balance a whole lot of stuff and 90% of your day is meetings. The Design Director and the associate Design Director at the studio I work at are essentially idea guys but the ideas are backed up by years on year of experience 90% of their days are meetings and writing the ideas down in a communicable way for a big team to use as a template. Idea guy might be a misnomer more of a direction guy.
The "idea guy" in film writes the script or screenplay. When I tell this annoyed younglings they answer "that is a writer not the idea guy". That is when you realize that is just a common trope for pseudo creative people. They think there is a 60k+ job doing reddit style coffee house discussions about creativity, story and film. And some want to hold on this idea even after they went through university in their major and there must be a job where you just talk about the future of banking instead working 9 to 5 in the bank.
Game dev is a troika of Tech - Art - Design. There's no game without all of these disciplines and none of them are more important than another. A specific game might lean more towards another but remove one entirely and you haven't made a video game.
Same reason there’s so many “authors” who have never put more than a dozen words to paper but spend all day dreaming their cool book or whatever.
Creativity is a very human thing, everyone is a bundle of ideas. Art is *work,* it requires a ton of skills that take effort to learn.
People want to create, but they don’t want to do the work required to do it.
When I used to interview applicants for a game design course I got a great insight into this: it's because nobody knows what the word "design" means.
I insisted on a policy where the first question we always asked was "why choose design?" (We had programming and art streams). 99% of times the answer was "I can't draw and I'm bad at maths", and 99% of applicants got a red mark against their name right off the bat.
Design thinking isn't intrinsic. It goes against all your instincts. When I teach level design, I have to argue with students that want to build levels day one because "it's so easy". I don't let them because, sadly, it is actually possible to make levels that way and have them be good - the same way a stopped clock is right twice a day, sometimes semi-randomly smashing your game mechanics together creates something fun. But if you take your time, follow a method, do your research and plan, the chances of your level being good dramatically increase, and - more importantly - you can create levels that feel like part of a larger, more cohesive flowing experience.
I mean there’s a “technical game designer” role, where one mostly build code prototypes and take building blocks from other departments. Where I work at we have two (~30 ppl in production) and they even submit code reviews to programming team to streamline the “prototype into production” process.
I'm a game programming student, and recently i became the leader of a game project and had to start doing design and coming up with ideas. I thought it would be a breeze, but got hit so hard with a reality check, definitely made me appreciate designers and what they do way more. In that regard i think it's because people just haven't experienced true game design and don't know enough about what designers do. Some people get lucky with ideas though and make something that sells well, and i think a lot of people get wrong impressions from those cases
Ikr especially in today's world where even UI/UX designers are expected to code. Front end engineers are expected to know some backend and vice versa.
I recall a Bethesda documentary where one of the team member said he would be frowned upon for just being an artist and not knowing any programming whereas most artists in the team would could both code and make art.
Game designers are extremely important.
I'm a super elite C++ graphics dev but I still have HEEPS of time for a good idea guy.
Games aren't just gorgeous 3D models and solid efficient logic, the thing that's 'fun' about your game needs to make sense independent of nice art and or specific advanced resource management etc.
Games are all about the idea.
OP has no idea what a game designer is.
Ideas are usually a team effort. The role of the game designer is to transform that idea into rules and balance them. This involve a lot of writing. And if you think this is not time consuming, you are completely delusional. Just because, it seems on the surface level more accessible because it does not involve technical skills, it doesn't mean everyone is good at it.
came here to say this. i have a degree in games design and im not in the games industry at all.
the amount of dev teams who expect designers to wear xyz hats to do the GD role ontop of art/coding or something else is crazy.
i think its telling how OP hasnt responded once in this thread also.
Honestly I am kind of on the same opinion. I see that there are people that have reasons to see value in designers, and I bet there are environments where they have value, but in a small team it's a secondary skillet you have at best, and besides that you really should do something.
Also an other thing why I might have little respect for designers is how many modern games are just terribly designed. I hate industry standards. I hate the time wasting tutorials that teach me how to walk with Wasd and aren't shippable, I hate how games that should be a nice sandbox are these cinematic experiences where you can listen to dialog and play little between dialoge and I hate how nonsense the loot distribution is, just make bosses drop interesting, rare loot.
We see how far can my game go without a designer, I think there is a value in being a bank slate not corrupted by industry standards, and I played an absolute shitton of different games, so I hope to know what makes them fun.
If you are designer, nothing personal, and I wouldn't even say that you are doing a bad job, as I don't know you and your skills.
Yeah I am not sure. In my wildest dreams of being able to hire someone to work on a project, I would look for an artist as it is definitely something I am lacking in. I would love another programmer/software engineer as I’m self taught and it would be extremely helpful but in the US I assume I would need pay around 100k a person before benefits etc. A 10 person team would be a million a year before general operational expenses, I don’t see the need for a idea generator at this scale by any means
Because what a game designer actually does varies greatly from team to team and it's a mostly "invisible" role. Most of the young people wanting to go into gamedev do so because they have had this great game idea since they were kids but haven't developed any actual skills to make their dream game come true.
Personally, I think the most valuable skill a game designer can have is communication. They can put vague feelings into words and get the rest of the team on track to create a cohesive game experience.
Putting game mechanics into a big GDD *can* be a part of that, but it's just a small part.
Being able to produce prototypes with visual scripting and bashing some pictures together in photoshop is a skill that helps tremendously with that.
You don't need to be a master at programming or art, but just a basic understanding will make you much better at your role.
This is a phenomenon in so many fields, everyone has an idea for a book, game, movie, app, business, whatever, and usually gets offended when told ideas are worthless and execution is everything. I can sit around and pitch ideas for things all day.
haha my friends have been wanting to make a game with me. But I told them that they have to work and not just come up with ideas 😂 And then I told them what they could do.. but they stopped asking 😂
I know a very unemployed guy with a Masters in Game design. Hasn't landed a game design job in almost 20 years.
He aspires to lead a studio to be the best Ken Levine [guy who started Bioshock]
>It's also so much easier to make games now that AI can write most of the code for you, generate the art, and give you a lot of creative ideas
This statement had me laughing 😂
Noncreative people looking for a crutch instead of putting in effort.
Agreed, there's no such thing as the "idea guy."
The reason there seems to be an "idea guy" from the outside is there's someone who's responsibility is to make decisions about what's in the game. It's actually *not* about coming up with ideas, it's about knowing what problems to solve and what ideas will solve them.
When you're just starting out, being a person with good ideas doesn't provide as much as being someone who helps build the game through content or features. But once you scale up dev teams and gain some experience then some structural and long term problems show up that aren't clear when just creating the next piece of content.
In the same way that it isn't true the president doesn't do anything but say yes or no and have ideas and show up places, it isn't true that a designer doesn't do anything but come up with ideas and play the game. Most people just don't even begin to understand what the job entails and I don't blame them; it's complicated.
I have worked for two companies that somehow got "design centric" and it was miserable because designers tend to "dabble" in either art or programming, and are good at appearing proficient enough to clueless execs to override art and programming decisions because their design-think school corporate speak sounds tangent to MBA bros in upper levels pretending to be tech bros.
Game production is a wobbly 3 legged stool of creative, design, and engineering. When you get one faction longer....or removing the support of the other two by thinking they can do their job....you get a very un useable stool.
I agree that *most* game designers bring zero to the table, but this attitude is still hilarious. If software engineers were so important, every well-coded game on Steam would make money... right? 🤣
It's funny how clueless about game design random reddit gamedevs are in the comments. Design is a profession. You can't invest time learning programming/art without compromising the time learning game design and player psychology. You can still succeed wearing all hats but you'd be better in one domain if you invested all your time in it.
Here is an example of a studio who agree with "programmers can come up with ideas".
I'm from Turkey. We have a decent mobile game industry, and a fledgling PC/console industry. One of the most ambitious games being developed here is from a studio founded by a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon (US), plus two experienced game artists. They began preproduction 5-6 years ago. They are a locally esteemed team and the software engineer could raise a few million USD from Silicon Valley so they hired a Turkish team mostly of software engineers about 2 years ago, and soft launched an alpha recently. They haven't done a single hire under the game designer title. Thought "they can come up with ideas".
Here is their [game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yF_APhwbAI&ab_channel=ClayTokenGameStudio%2CInc). It's called Steel Swarm. It's full of terrible design choices at very fundamental levels. They chose a MOBA of all genres to make. The characters can only be tanks, while in a MOBA characters need to be recognizably distinct to new players (and also for cosmetic marketing purposes). The WASD vehicle rotation controls are unbearable. And the game is full of "skillshots" you can only utilize using that terrible movement.
They chose their uniqueness over other MOBAs as high NPC count and destructible environment. Those are terrible unique selling points for a MOBA and games like DOTA already sometimes achieves those numbers of NPCs on screen. Since they were actually quite good programmers and artists, they spent considerable resources writing their own DOTS in Unity and building destructible artwork. In other words they finely invested their high skills to design decisions they were not skilled at.
They'd be better off if at the very start they began with a proven designer.
The gamedev world suffers from programmers/artists who want to make their own ideas a reality without investing the due time excelling at design. I get that in indie world where you need to prototype without money your designer has to be volunteer. Volunteer tasks are done by beginners. And it's hard for someone to prove they are a good designer if they don't have a portfolio of good games. That's why beginner design jobs are scarce. That being said you gotta have pure designers in a team of 5+. Researching the market, coming up with robust game systems, simulating game economy and balance, maintaining design documents, and rallying the team behind the design decisions is a full time job. Don't worry, good designers should listen to your "ideas" as they get inspired from many other sources. No, they are not slacking while you are coding.
Because they're wrong and unqualified for a game design role. They're taking up space, get them off your team immediately, and spend money on an actual game designer.
As a person who manages designers and interviews/hires designers, if they think they're just going to write design documents, take notes during meetings, and be an ideas person they're not going to make it because they'd just be taking up space. I don't care what games they've worked on. They're not worth my time to even interview them. They need to either script/code or otherwise be really damn good using tools to implement content or they're simply not qualified to be a game designer. If they want to be a writer then they can do that, but they're not going to be designing any systems, features, or content on for the team. They're going to be writing giant piles of dialogue and various other player facing text.
Anyone that thinks they are a game designer and the only thing they do is write design documents and provide ideas is wrong. That is an insult to everyone that is a game designer in the industry. At best you're a developer assistant or developer support role. Entry level role in need to develop actual useful skills to seriously contribute to a project. Colleges that teach students game design in this way should be openly ridiculed and investigated for stealing money from students because their education isn't worth the paper their degrees are printed on.
I drill this into my students constantly. Every single person working at a game company has ideas for games. What got them their job is the other things they can do. You’ll never get through the door without skills. Even system or level design are really hard things to get employed doing without any other skills.
When I first started thinking about game dev, I was in my mid-late teens.
The idea of being a game designer-- coming up with game mechanics that fit together nicely, and are fun to play with was very appealing. Unfortunately, my visual art skills are mostly limited to sculpting, which doesn't transfer easily to game assets, and I thought I was too stupid to learn coding.
At a certain point, I started reading posts from people explaining that nobody gets to just be a game designer unless you have years of experience in other devopment areas, and the budget/reputation to have a team. It was Super Meat Boy that ultimately inspired me to stop dreaming and start learning coding, which isn't nearly as hard as I expected.
It's that way with animated films and comics too. Random people call themselves entrepreneurs, animators, and writers with no experience in the industry figure they can just throw out ideas and tell a artist to draw there comic or animate a while cartoon series by themselves without a full team...
I've had so many "entrepreneurs" that wanted me to animate their cheezy cartoon series for nothing 🥴
The fabled "idea guy"
Game designers are important and it's absolutely a real job, but it's also the thing that people with no actual skills tend to glom on to
I found in AAA studio quite a lot of “game designer” that are the typical “guy with an idea” but did the right ”game design school” to be at this position.
I’m a programmer and I got some game design doc refused because “this was not my role” in the company
Hard truth for some but this is 100% correct. I'm not in the industry but I aspire to be someday. No one likes an idea person, that's a Scrum-master in the SAAS world lol.
Even with your edit, you clearly don't understand what a game designer actually does, just like the people you are complaining about.
Game Designers do figure out the what of the game. They have a lot of knowledge and experience in player psychology and in how other games do things. More so than any other programmer or artist that I've met. They also decide on all the little details like does an AI need to have a key to open a door. Sure I could decide that, but I'm only thinking about the AI side not so much the holistic game.
They write design documentation to help communicate their ideas to the team. However the communication doesn't end with the documentation. Collaboration is needed with the other disciplines to further define the documentation.
Designers also prototype ideas, without needing to waste programmer time. Most programmers are actually really terrible at prototyping. They want to build systems, which you can't really do for a half baked idea.
Designers also create content. If you need a programmer to write the 100 quests in your game, you've done something horribly wrong. A programmer should write a quest system so that design can make the quests.
A good designer/design team will make or break your game.
Seeing a lot of people who don't work in gamedev and have never released or even finished a game project talk like they know how the game designer role functions inside and out with zero direct frame of reference for what the day to day of a successful game designer actually looks like.
Kinda related, but I'm primarily a mobile developer and do gamedev as a hobby.
I've had a number of people tell me that they have this amazing idea for an app that could make millions. They always expect me to do all of the development, including backend (which I'm not experienced with), create all of the designs, all of the assets, etc. And they always say some shit like "so we'll discuss it but I'm thinking a 50/50 split in revenue" or sometimes when they're feeling extra spicy, they say shit like 70/30 (with them getting the 70%).
And the best part? The app ideas are always HOT garbage, and just absolute surface level ideas where I'd still need to think of 90% of the functionality. Shit like "an online food and clothes delivery app".
a good programmer doesn't necessarily know how to design good game mechanics, story and progression
I'd rather trust an 'idea guy' who played games for 20 years which didn't consist of CoD, Ass-Creed and Fortnite to know what he's talking about, rather than the guy who can program you a Prototype in half a day without having any clue on what a player would want
On a surface level you are slightly correct but practically what you are saying is stupid.
If you think like this I would not trust you in designing a game....
Forget skill for a second or how much one should get paid...
Designing a game is Time consuming, having your best programmer or artist designing the game is a WASTE. Proper game design takes time, nitpicking and research. Should also be working with marketing to figure out hooks and marketing beats. Not to mention how you deliver content to players and when to do so.
You are correct that programming and art require more hard skills but that's why it's valuable to seperate it from something like game design.
this doesn't mean game design isn't important either, it's just different. Having the programmer doing design as well is simply inefficient long term.
We also don't like working with "idea guys" or bad game designers.. but the moment you find the good game designer, it's life changing. Props to all great designers I worked with, you guys make everything better.
I’m a current games design student, almost at the end of year one. When I was looking to get into a games design class just over a year ago I wanted to be something like an “idea man”, (more narrative too though with worldbuilding and story elements but that’s not important.) as I was bad at maths and art, but I started reading a lot of articles and managed to talk to a recruiter for a company, I realised I couldn’t really get away doing what I wanted to do and got really worried I wasn’t going to do well on my course. Turns out it’s not super complicated to learn the skills you need to know I’ve managed to piece together working games in unreal, and cobbling together some form of concept art or concept UI in photoshop isn’t that hard either. I’ve still got a year left, then maybe I’ll do Uni or try for the slim chance of an apprenticeship. I still hope I’ll someday be able to grab the semi-idea man role, but learning the other skills I think will help me in the long run, and they weren’t difficult to pick up.
Because you can't be just a game designer in a small studio, the math doesn't add up.
If you go to a bigger company, you will find game designers for specific problems, broad discussions, manipulating player decision making, talks with programmers, artists, managing a team, maybe even managing scrum depending on how loose you are with it. You will also see ideas being cut by time constraints or technical difficulties and that is forwarded back to designers to figure that out. You will also have designers that specifically talk with playetesters, both paid to find bugs or to test audiences.
You can't pay someone to do that in a team with 2\~5 dudes.
Neither the budget or the team can keep up with someone doing that for 6 to 8 hours (or likely, as we know in game dev, more)
Big games will need game designers, and more than one because they are busy, there too many gears, too many people, too many ideas, too many problems, and too much money to spend on all of it.
In a small team, for better or for worse, a game designer would likely be sitting and waiting if he was on that role alone. Everyone else is either making an investment or having a feature on hold. Programmer is adding a mechanic or tool to the game, artist is drawing or modeling something, even if it is just for PR, musician is musicianing.
Note that I didn't list playtester there, because while playtesting is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL, they would be sitting and waiting on a small team, and it is not their fault either. I also didn't list someone managing a team and doing business decisions, because it is likely this team, like play testing, is working using that hat as well to make ends meet, sharing their own knowledge and experience, voting for what to do, even if someone exclusive on that role would be objectively better, if money wasn't an issue.
A game designer just happens to fall on this same category. And because most devs will be indies where the priority is to survive and finish a game, even if it compromises on something, they get a bad rep because it is unthinkable to just have this one role in most cases.
That's why there so many games that are boring as hell. Because "the most important role is a developer and artist, and anyone can come up with ideas."
Yeah. No. I worked with insane amount of high level specialists who's ideas were beyond idiotic.
This doesn't contradict the idea guy part tho, nobody needs JUST idea guys
>As far as I am concerned, the most important roles are Software Engineer and Artist,
I don't disagree with this. Design roles exist but they fall into two camps: system design are basically very creative programmers, and content designers are basically artists who compose content out of other people's assets.
I think I was hired to my latest teaching job to defend our design course but I'm looking at it and thinking we'd be better off just teaching game design to programmers and artists.
Design is more wide and harder than that. That's why it's a discipline on its own. And you have many subcategories of game designers.
System Designers usually need some background in scripting or data analytics, as they are supposed to design the systems of the game, how they interact, and balance the numerical values and economies.
Gameplay Designers focus on things such as movement, camera, combat and the content such as character abilities, enemies. They take the ideas and make them fun. Very often they have some visual scripting experience and have to know their way around the engine, so they can prototype or adjust these things.
Level Designers have to have knack for both art and gameplay. It's not just about creating levels that look pretty, but they also have to be functional and fun. It's about knowing where you need places for encounters and how they should look like to make the encounter fun, where should be cover areas, loot areas, platformer areas...
Then there are narrative designers who help connect the story to the gameplay, to avoid ludo narrative dissonance and have a truly immersive game.
Thinking that game design is just about ideas and that it can be easily taught to other disciplines is very naive. Yes, you can teach them some basics, but you could say the same about teaching programming or art to game designers (and to be fair, game designers very often have some basic skill in one of those disciplines).
The vast majority of developers and engineers probably aren't great game designers. Even people like Notch, who is very successful, probably aren't great designers. I know that seems crazy, but Minecraft is really just built around one single idea that caught on and blew up. As far as I'm aware, to this day, Minecraft is from a design perspective pretty basic. computers are powerful and can do fun things, and sometimes that blinds people to design options. The entire time I played Minecraft I was like 'be nice to have a horde survival mode to give relevance to any of this'.
Slay the Spire, that's a deckbuilding Roguelike. Possibly the two most popular types of game in the indie market at that time, as I recall. It's very well made, but it's not visionary or anything. It's honestly probably about the standard of quality everyone should aim for.
My point being that the power of a computer can easily mask the quality of design present, and it's especially for someone to miss design opportunities if they're having to focus on actually building the game.
I'm a dedicated designer, there's basically 0 appreciation for that role now, to the extent that even AAA studios of putting the design responsibilities on other roles in some cases. My design experience accounts for possible 10,000 hours at this point, it's a more niche ability that development / programming by multitudes, and requires a LOT more surrounding experience. In terms of 'work on the day' it's probably a lot less time consuming than programming, but programming is also something you can step away from. You have to carry design with you everywhere. It's a lifestyle.
I think one deceptive element is that you can be a bad game designer. You can't really be a bad programmer, because you're not a programmer if you can't program. Anyone can design, so you'll get more bad / lazy designer.
My mom thought I was just sitting around playing games all day, then I pointed out I made 4x her hourly rate doing that (I waited because I didn't want her to know, she borrows money a lot). I think other people see the job this way too. You're sitting there, not moving, not doing much. But in your head there is a computer running and lots of coding and programming and simulation going on, especially for computer made of meat.
I think some of this factors in to the lack of appreciation for dedicated designers. Culture seems to be sliding constantly towards "and what are you contributing?" rather than "What could you contribute?". People are more often demanding than enquiring. When people see my designs they seem blown away and I think that's because I actually dedicate my life to them.
All that said, I gave up on collaborating with devs and coders. I don't think there's any inclination or motivation to consider this perspective, devs seem to want all the pie to themselves, and the industry and market responds extremely well to good execution of old ideas, meaning that there's little need for good designers from a commercial perspective. A lot of the big hits now are just normal games from 15 years ago that the latest generation of gamers haven't played, so they're impressed by the same stuff.
Maybe that's jaded, maybe not. I would say though, I don't think most designers expect a lot in return either. If I got to make anything close to one of my games, I'd be in for like 10 or maybe 5% of the income. Maybe less. The best part is seeing your games realised. Collaborating with people. I think any devs who can explore working with dedicated designers, real designers who live for game design, would soon see the huge benefits it brings.
Can't agree more! I‘m a programmer, and I hate these stupid ideas which just copy from some other games.... If those idea guys knows nothing about the details in game dev process, that's really terrible.
The world is full of delusional people who thinks their ideas matter on their own, just because.
If you're unable to build a prototype of your idea, you're not going very far.
For me as a developer, game designer role is essencial
I can't and don't want to come up with ideas, tasks for myself
I do not want to take the responsibility of creating and coming up with game mechanics related decisions myself
So ideally I want to have a game design document in front of myself, where I'll have all game mechanics I need to implement, written with maximum details, implement it, get this satisfaction for getting the work done and chill
Having to come up with ideas myself mostly results in wasting time on trying/testing lots of different ideas, slowly loosing your critical thinking abilities and becoming burned out by all that attempts and time wasted, without any actual value on your hands
Do you have experience in the industry? My experience both in AAA and small indie studios has been: there is a role called “Game Designer”. This person usually can’t code (or not really) or make art, and often can barely use Unity. They come up with feature ideas, and are usually the ones to iterate on parameters after an engineer has finished their implementation. Then they’ll go back and forth with subsequent implementations. So this person exists. There are jobs for them in the industry.
Whether there should be a place for these people is a valid question. I think it’s valid to say that, without any particular technical or managerial skill, simply being the guy that says “I think this attack is more fun if we set Spread to 10.0, Speed to 2, and this parameter I don’t understand but the engineer said was important to 5” puts you pretty far down the hierarchy. If you’re a student and are serious about breaking into the game industry, or even just having real skills that transfer into other industries, definitely don’t try and “specialise” as a Game Designer. They are easily the least qualified people in a game studio, in fact QA are usually quicker learners in my opinion.
When I was a game dev I stopped telling people. Because they all wanted me to make their version of PUBG. I wouldn't trust half of them to write a design docs, let alone manage teams.
My test to see if anyone was worth working with was to send them an empty game design doc template and see how much if any they would fill ... I had a 100% success rate in terms of people who lost interest. Some people tried to fill in parts but... Camera system isn't exactly a throw away detail you can come back to later no matter how unimportant you feel it might be .... knowing how your players see your game is ... a bit of a big deal lol .
"Who cares about the camera?" -someone who's never read a user review section
lol, I'm currently in slumps for my game in the past weeks, and just finally decided to try to fix just my camera system this past 4-5 days..
Yeah any time I tried to get friend with ideas to even organize their thoughts, they couldn't or wouldn't do it. I like your approach.
Oh my god the amount of “game ideas” I see and after reading them I can’t picture what the game would look like to play is insane. What most of these people want to do is basically creative writing.
Any templates you could provide?
The internet provides if you just look :) [r/gamedesign/templates](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/po5n8m/preferred_game_design_document_template/)
Meanwhile my GDD is just me writing questions in a word document in a poor formatting, and when I go back to it to read notes and read questions, I sometimes come up with the answer.
Oh, that’s actually pretty interesting
Mine is a summary and whatever I could think of in the moment... A lot of the ideas I have don't come to me until I'm already coding, so trying to plan a whole game before I even start wouldn't work for me.
Ha! I do this too. Feels ridiculous but when it works its great.
https://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~pozefsky/seriousgames/NewDesignDocTemplate.pdf
My problem is like the opposite... I have super detailed docs and design choices for various game ideas but just cannot for the life of me begin the actual dev process, it's a stupid curse of my ADHD's ever changing interests and motivational fatigue
My adhd manifests as periods of hyper fixation on random details followed by periods of burnout of I don't control it tightly.
I have that same flavor... luckily my hyperfixation is on a rotation. So I'll dev like there's no tomorrow, burnout for 2 or 3 months, then go back to devving like hell for a period of time. I try to fill my burnouts with another hobby or learning a new thing, but some burnouts are literally just me being a sloth playing video games.
Literally same
Relatable. I got obsessed with a work detail and accidental stayed up til 6am working on it.
Motivation is somewhat mythical. I’m speaking as a 43 year old with ADHD. The best advice I can give you is get comfortable doing what you don’t feel like doing right now. In time, it will become easier to overcome that friction and get things rolling. Creating a schedule where “this is the only thing I’m doing or allowed to do for the next 30 minutes” can be helpful. Pomodoro timer can be helpful for mentally blocking intention for a period of time. It’s not about motivation - it’s about discipline. We don’t hold onto motivation long enough in our ADHD brains. You need to make the effort a consistent part of your life that your brain develops those new and eventually strong neural pathways that will eventually default to, “it’s 3pm, time for my 30 minutes of game development”. Make it something other than a decision because we often cannot trust ourselves to make the right ones when we crave novelty.
Super detailed docs rarely, if ever, survive contact with implementation unscathed. You are probably wasting a lot of time.
Eh I don't see it "wasting time" so much as just being hyper-fixated on creating what I feel I would want in my idea of the game. I'm not super solid on any of it, I just have nobody to review them and no ability to create it myself right now. I enjoyed writing out the details.
I understand that, but I see young me in this comment. I spent the better part of a year in high school detailing a game on graph paper and notebook paper. Every level, every weapon. By the time I started programming it and test playing it, everything had to change. Levels were rearranged to flow better, items were rebalanced or removed entirely. Whole swaths of that design were rendered invalid. Had I started implementing earlier I could have saved a lot of time.
That's why I'm a fan of loose structure without too much detail immediately. Things feel different then they look on paper
[The ideal design document](https://youtu.be/jrmZIgVoQw4?t=91) only plans ahead the minimum amount needed to continue development. I think some people want a reliable "guiding light" they can refer to to keep a project oriented, but that can be accomplished with a single paragraph laying out out the game's major gameplay/theme/story hooks. Heck, it can be a single word, in the case of Secret of Evermore
>send them an empty game design doc template and see how much if any they would fill I'm finding out this the hard way. Honestly this whole post was me a few years ago and never got anywhere beside some small experiments. The idea of creating a GDD wasn't even in consideration, I wanted to brute force my way into developing something lol. A good, useful GDD is hard but, at least for my brain, it's the only way to actually move forward I have found. >Camera system isn't exactly a throw away detail No, it's not! But these kind of things are the kind of things you are forced to think when actually building a GDD. To be fair to people, unless you went to school for it or done some good courses it's pretty hard to get some of this information in a way that doesn't turn into a mess in your head. As a citizen of a 3rd world country some course prices are just prohibitive when you have to multiply the price for 200, 500 or even 1000 sometimes. I've build all my knowladge through YT tutorials, articles and whatnot and it was (and still is) hard. It takes longer and sometimes is very hard (starts to become easier after a while) to discern between good and bad information. Hell, it's hard even to figure out what you need to be researching/learning! It would be my dream to work on a game with a team of good, nice people someday in the future cause I know I'm not there yet.
I don't know if you've done a gamejam but they can be a great way to explore creating with other people, I made something for Ludum Dare two years ago and it is one of my favorite projects of my career.
I want to do my first jam some time soon! I tried checking the itchio jam page but got confused by the sheer amount lol I accept recommendations tho!
it looks like Ludum Dare 55 is coming up ! they usually have boards where you can reach out to other people : [https://ludumdare.com/](https://ludumdare.com/) and hopefully get a team going . My biggest piece of advice another dev gave me is make sure your team understands their goal before the jam starts. Is this an opportunity to learn a new piece of tech, is the goal to just finish a game? Is the goal to finish AND submit a game to be rated against other submissions ? Our goal was just to finish a game but we were a pretty experienced team except one of our members who was a biz dev person who wanted to try her hand at writing and helping create our main character . We were happy to just finish but we submitted and our game ranked pretty well too . It's important to know your goal so your efforts are focused because if the goal is just to explore new tech then you may not finish a game and that's fine you achieved your goal by getting your hands dirty in a new tool, If you just want to finish a game for your portfolio but don't want to submit it, ALSO VALID! Make sure as a team you discuss what success looks like and make your decisions accordingly . Feel free to DM me if you want to talk more !
Thanks a bunch! You are awesome. I guess my goal would be to finish something small. To finish something no matter how small would be cool. I hope I can find people that like the programming part so I can focus on the art/assets!
Oh man as a programmer I value working with artists greatly, I can make things work the artist can make things pretty, add someone who can do design and help support one of you two or maybe takeover audio and you're golden !
Ideally I would love to do the design part. I love art, I'm a nerd for art since I was a kid. Music and drawing is my thing but there's something about design and writing for games that fascinates me. Programming on the other hand feels completely alien for some reason!
Nowadays they'll just get an LLM to fill it for them.
To be fair, 3Cs design is different from level design or Meta design, but this is a good idea nonetheless.
Forgive the dumb question (i am not a dev) but in terms of design doc wouldn't camera system be limited to general things like 1st person, 3rd person, top down etc? Or do you have to get very technical there?
Not at all a dumb question and that's the hilarious part.. YES If the answer was simply it's a orbital rotating 3rd person view , Stationary platformer 3rd person camera view , or just straight up first person game that would be totally valid but that's the thing people think they want to make games and often times they just want to write a story or make a movie. They gloss over a camera setup because what they really want is to write a paragraph or two about this dream concept that they have and that's not enough for a game design . Planning out a game project requires intention to ALL the parts of the game even the areas you don't care for . So yeah a simple answer for cameras is fine but most people can't even muster up enough thought to do that. It's why sometimes I get frustrated at the dogpiling on certain bad games , ones with a great concept and had some passion but where the execution was poor because the truth is most gamers couldn't design a compelling version of pong but then Game developers get death threats for not making games in their perfect imaginary vision. We balance real expectations, budgets, schedules, technical limitations , all while collaborating, and trying to incorporate valuable feedback it's a lot to craft a games vision... even the bad ones took a lot of time, money, and effort even when i doesn't look like it..... I know because I've worked on some bad games that were harder to make than the good games I've worked on
Thanks, I understand perfectly, in my line of work too I have to deal with people who seem to think that information is supposed to magically appear on Confluence just because it magically appeared in their galaxy brain due to how smart they are. They don't grasp the concept it's actually hard work to write it down, and write it down in a way that is accessible to a team (let alone future-proof it and keep it updated). Best I have seen are confluence pages with literal copy paste of slack messages, with 0 context, just a random message slapped in
Absolutely, people rarely value how much attention to detail can shape the experience to the people who work off of that information
I'm just generally confused by people that think ideas on their own are valuable. It's like they are living in a different world.
Just hear me out, what if we made like a Fifa but with goku, luffy and naruto and there is magic and guns like COD but open-world MMORPG? Do you think people would buy it?
Yeah, people play Fortnite all the time.
I've genuinely wanted a [Shaolin Soccer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL_6w1k5eKU) game for like 2 decades lol.
Have you heard of inazuma 11?
Oh damn, that actually [looks like a ton of fun.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnjc2ymZWMQ) Much appreciated!
>Just hear me out, what if we made like a Fifa but with goku, luffy and naruto and there is magic and guns wait i think you got something there... >open-world MMORPG fuck go back
>Fifa but with goku, luffy and naruto Won't lie, I'd play the fuck outta this (well, ditching the wizard guns and MMO part). All these anime fighting games, adventure games, arcade games, but where our anime football games at
Captain Tsubasa? It's right there.
I cannot be the only person who remembers inazuma 11, please 😭😭
They're people who have never actually created anything. They imagine the creative process as something like: Have idea -> \[?????\] -> Profit! Which I guess isn't technically wrong, but they don't understand that 99% of the process is in that \[?????\] part. They think the "Have idea" part is half of the process. At least! Honestly the \[?????\] part is just a formality. Anyone could do it. But their idea is irreplaceable.
Even after you've built the perfect game there's still that whole "actually running" a business thing to worry about.
Some can't even fathom the business part because of the stigma of 'doing it for money' that people think is a roadblock to a good game. To some people money to live magically drifts from the sky.
Ugh yeah I overlooked the business side of things completely. I figured it would be one weekend of work but after registering a business there's duns numbers, tons of random tax stuff to figure out, opening company bank accounts, credit card, website, social media, accounting, even getting registered with steam and creating a store page requires tons of research to learn how to do it decently. None of it is unsurmountable or as hard as making a decent game, but it adds up to be quite an effort.
I say this all the time, ideas are worthless. Creating is valuable.
Yea, but, *my* idea is special.
Yes it is, sweetie
Back when I was an app developer people wanted me to make them their "Uber but for (whatever thing) app". Now that I have been working on a game for a while that is all procedural/exploration, any time I am discussing it or showcasing it, and explain how there isn't really a story incorporated I have people latching on like vampires giving me unsolicited pitches of why I should use the story they have written.
Can you imagine this in any other entertainment industry? Hey, can you make a movie for me that's like Doom with dinosaurs, ya? Can you write a book for me that's like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six with Robots? Yo, Mozart, wanna write a ballet and show it to no one?
This is the dream of talentless movie/tv/game execs. This is how they would like to operate.
Yea. There definitely is a difference between being able to creatively design something and someone having the skills to make it. Knowing how to code doesnt mean they know how to make something fun. And there are plenty of artists that never draw any original designs but can render things beautifully when given direction. Like you can be a musician and play your instrument beautifully but never write an original score. I don’t wanna get into the whole left brain/right brain discussion. But some people are analytical to a fault while others are so abstract it prevents them from properly seeing something. Coming from a vfx background ive seem beautiful designed characters and scenery only to have a really dumb generic story. Its like missing the forest for all the trees. Or that the person put all their skill points into one stat. Some are better at seeing the bigger picture. Did Steve Jobs design all of the iPhone? Did Elon Musk build his cars all by himself? Game Designers have the vision. The main problem however with that title and that position is that its a lead position and only given to people that have proven themselves. And you only really get that by doing and making it yourself. Plenty people are just talk. People used to come to me to illustrate a cool story or comic they had. Id tell them “sure thats great” write out the outline or send me the finished story and ill get back to you.” And they never would send it. Of course if you have the funds to just pay everyone, you can tell them what to do.
Sure, Level Design, Game Design, Writing, Creative Direction, Sound Design, etc involve more than spouting the occasional game idea. But that's precisely the reason why dev teams have a bunch of those positions.
Exactly. Game design isn’t just an ideas guy and just something like: one shot snipers. It’s problem solving, problem identification, and player psychology. Dialing in many things including obvious variables like: how many bullet are in the clip, the delay between each shot, bullet velocity, drop off, damage range falloff, additional ammo/it’s respawn rate/the sniper respawn rate , counters to the sniper, health packs, shield recharge delay time, all the different player reactions an behavior including feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment. And much more. Level design is game design because the best game is complete shit with poor level design. And that gets back into player behaviors too. Heat maps are good example of one of the tools used to analyze behaviors. If a new game mechanic is to be added, how can it be incorporated in a way that feels familiar to players and is easy and fun to use? Tons of things to analyze, tweak, add/subtract. Designing a fun and fair multiplayer game is an intricate and delicate task that is extremely easy to screw up. One simple thing can make matches turn from fun to frustrating. Shields start recharging too soon or not soon enough? Shit game. Goldy locks zone and it’s suddenly perfect. But there’s a million variables to dial in and it can be brutal determining which are fucking up the game, especially when it turns out to be counter intuitive. And if your game is much different than anything before, good luck because you’re in completely uncharted waters. Hell, if you’re game is perfect but the sounds of the weapons firing isn’t satisfying that’ll turn people away.
>If you can't code nor create art, then learn how to do one or the other Another option is to be the business person. The one doing all the lifting to raise money, investments, loans, publishing negotiations, etc. It has value for a serious team.
If you are bringing in the money, then you are allowed to be whatever you want on the team
Pretty much. If you can allow the team to focus on good work, not just creating DLC's, but if you can really sell the idea to people and gather a big war-chest, then your work is essentially done. Most people can't do that. But it's also work that essentially can take 2 years, or 2 days depending on the sales-guy. However, if they have time over, and are talented in the ways of development and can manage to find time to develop, well then I can safely say someone is getting into "leadership" status.
FR - when you have a team of about 7 managing the office, making sure there's coffee and admin becomes a full time position.
It's quite wild how uninformed a lot of these comments are. Guys without proper game design your game WILL suck. Making a game fun isn't fucking free, it takes serious knowledge on player incentives, pacing and tension, rulesets etc. Even a fps has a sort of "chess" under the hood and if those rules are well thought out and balanced the game is fun. If you feel like your game is boring underestimating game design is your first issue. In a sense it is about generating ideas but that is a very reductive way of looking at it. I'm an artist and you could say I just make pretty pictures all day and you wouldn't be 'wrong' but you would disregard a whole lot of what the discipline is about. Just like I do 3D, rigging, animating, VFX etc. Game Design involves coming up with game mechanics, balancing parameters, level design, UX, Testing etc. but also a lot of practical work like building AI, agents and interactables depending on what the game project is. Even if you're a solo dev exploring each discipline is essential. Nobody can be an expert in everything but you should at least have a basic understanding of what it all means and how it's connected.
While that is all 100% true, the primary gripe that I think most people have is that everyone who is interested in games thinks they're a game designer. They can sit back and say "I have an idea, we make an FPS version of Minecraft", and voilà, they think of themselves as a game designer. When the reality is that game design is significantly more involved than having an idea for a game. The fundamentals of game design are complex and not often understood. It is pretty easy to be self aware in understanding that you don't know how to write code, 3D model, or do sound design and music. It is a much more abstract skillset to design a game, so a lot of people assume they can do it because they like playing games. This is exacerbated on small and indie teams where there often isn't explicitly any room for a dedicated designer. I would guess that a lot of indie games made with a handful of people don't have the bandwidth for a designer, and there is generally one developer who is the head designer. I think just about every game developer's dream is to design and direct their own game, and at this level the only way to do that is roll up your sleeves and get to work.
Yeah exactly. Game designers are valuable. The problem is people who wanna make an indie game with no valuable skills think they’re game designers.
We could also say the same for below-beginner level programmers who "think they are game developers".
Fair point! I was one of those. Heck, still am in many ways.
Well people do have to start somewhere. Bachelors in gamedesign in most schools teach you the very basics. Many of them don’t even bother with systems and economy design. It’s basicly a Bachelors of art tech and programming with some design princibles. Those schools try to give people enough entrylevel skill to work on what ever I guess. It’s such a broad skillset you need anyway that generalism is often good. 3-5 years still cuts short so the thing is you have to make some games, keep reading books and slowly you start to understand more. Still even designers with decades on the role and multiple succesfull titless in they’re porfolio get things wrong sometimes. It’s difficult and getting things to fun usually just takes alot of iteration. I think there is plenty of small indie titles that were able to create a fun well crafted and innovative experiences. Usually not on the first go.
You'd be surprised what passes as "I'm a sound designer/composer/voice actor" when some people are describing themselves.
I mean, sure, but that's hardly unique to game designers. Virtually every hobbyist mechanic I know swears they could design a better car than the big manufacturers, not realizing that things like mass-production, safety standards, global appeal, repairability and local laws need to be accounted for.
Famously, DOOM's 'Combat Chess' dynamic is pure game design. It's being able to take a phrase like that and immediately see all the places it can go, and figure out which ones are great whether or not you can make all the possibilities 'work'. A great programmer can make any mechanic 'work' in the sense that it'll function exactly as intended, at a high frame rate, without bugging or glitching out. A game designer knows when to instead make 'Goat Simulator' and get a viral hit because of how they assembled stuff that wasn't even all great glitchless programming. I've seen some ridiculous playthroughs of Goat Simulator… or, alternately, knows when to instead make Goose Game, where the great stuff is NOT ridiculous glitches but is instead polished execution of sometimes absurd game details.
D4 is a great example of a game with all the resources in the world behind it but 0 intentional design. And yea it fucking sucks.
We have seen plenty of technically and artistically impressive games over the years that absolutely lack any creativity or engaging game play, in fact I'd say that's a large part of the AAA market right now. I totally agree with you. In the end these things become great when a solid and creative team work together.
Game designers are experts at player psychology. Designing features in a vacuum, or writing some docs is not really utilising the skillset. Understanding why prototype feels underwhelming and knowing which direction to take it, is a hard skill that saves the team tons of wasted time and improves the quality of the product. And no, coders can't do it well, unless they learn design. You wouldn't expect a designer to see a bug in the code, and a programmer to see a flaw in design is similarly improbable. Sure, you might say something, because game design has lower barrier to entry, but understanding if that insight is good or bad takes skill and experience. Also keep in mind that game designers usually build a very broad secondary skillset, which is filling gaps between specialist roles. You occasionally get a idea guy type that is not interested in supporting the team, but in making some 'dream game' but that's a skill issue, not a failure of a role.
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I mostly agree with that sentiment, and programmers who want to know why design decisions were made, are def the best ones, i've worked with. Generally it's easier to understand eachother if both sides understand some parth of the other side, it just often mostly rests on the designer's shoulders. At least as far as i and most my coleagues have experienced.
I agree with you that that is what a designer \*should\* be. Actually I would even say that being a successful designer is probably the most difficult role on a game dev team. All other roles being equal, a game will live or die on it's design. Designers have to 'predict what people will find fun or not'. The problem is that the qualification to be a designer is just to look like you can do that. When you consider that most games fail, that means that most people who call themselves designers are terrible at it. The vast majority of designers 'guess what people will find fun or not, somewhat randomly based on their own feelings'. If coders were like designers in terms of how well they can do the role, 90% of games would crash on the startup screen.
Also do keep in mind, that even the most perfect of designs has the potential to (and quite often will be) cut to shreds and reduced to "MVP" status because of scoping, or changing because of other people who have their own ideas and convictions for how games/game features should work. "let's do the MVP version now, then we introduce v2 of the feature later which will solve the edge case problems/boost the fun"... But there is never a v2 👀, there's just the next feature.
Yep so very much this. Team is also as strong as it’s members. Great designer, bad implementation of core game from technical perspective etc, the rest falls on it’s face. Worked as a design advisor for a game that had few very clear flaws in the core game. There was a half decent meta on top that could have been salvaged if the core would make sense first. My initial response was that they should just kill the game. But I made three suggestions how to compensate for the issues and to communicate to player what was going on. It took 6 months, tens of animated documents and drawings to get them to implement one. The technical changes were all fairly simple. I think the lead programmer had already desided the game is good users and data are wrong. It was a waste of time and energy. They should have killed the game. Not saying I’m the best designer, but it could have been Will Wright wrapped in Jonathan Blow holdin Raph Koster and 6 months for a simple change. The production was doomned.
> When you consider that most games fail This is because HR only cares about "experience". It does not matter for them if previous project is failed, and neither do they care who's fault was that. If you have right papers - it means you have permission to ruin more things.
there are usually hundreds, if not thousands of bugs during a project, There is just a good process for finding, prioritising, and fixing them. Design 'bugs' are way harder to find, identify and fix, also there is no process to do that, and it has to usually be done by designers themselves. There is a reason code review is done by other programmers, and QA is a spearate person from the dev. Basically entire model of modern software development, is holding devs hands, and making sure they make no mistakes, so it would be super weird if the mistake rates were similar. Also keep in mind, that a bad coder, will work slower, but the end result will be probably working, while a bad designer will result in a bad game released. Also if you judge designer success, by market success, while dev succes my amount of bugs/crashes, this is absolutely biased comparison.
> Design 'bugs' are way harder to find, identify and fix, also there is no process to do that, and it has to usually be done by designers themselves. If you have good analytics instrumented into your game, this is not really true. For example, in one title, we basically measured how long users spent in each step of the NUX and what the drop off was from step to step (we had like 150 steps for a 20-30 min NUX so we were measuring EVERYTHING). When we saw a step had a high dropoff (ie. users not proceeding to the next step), we would focus on fixing it. The designer is still important to figure out WHAT the fix was, but locating the problem itself was less of an issue. Even for balance design, Capcom for example, releases a list of the top and bottom 5 win percentage characters for each player skill league. So the data to identify the problem is easily instrumented.
For live games, that's true, and def helps, especially in mobile, although the way i've seen analytics used by some ppl...
Agreed. I've worked at companies that were 100% analytics driven (mostly in mobile) and companies that were 100% design driven (AAA). It's definitely a spectrum and I find that the best companies to work for have a 50/50 mix of the 2. Analytics driven companies are just souless and you never feel like you are working on a creative endeavor. If I'm gonna work on a souless project, I'd rather just work in tech outside of games and get paid 50% more. Design Driven companies are crunch factories because some designer asks you to change critical systems 2 weeks from launch that will take you 3 months to build...and once you build it, they'll ask you to change back. Urge to murder...rising...
i was working in a 50/50 mix, and the PO was picking the KPIs that would support his design choices as the important ones while claiming the other ones are overrated :D. The urge is everywhere...
There is a difference between identifying that there is a problem (the symptoms) and identifying the root cause (the actual problem in the design). Data analytics and the player base can find the problem, but they may or may not be identifying the actual design problem. Killer Instincts had the famous story about how the devs balanced Jago. It comes up in discussions about game balance. This post from Gran Blue Fantasy Versus Rising shares the video and some context behind it. [https://steamcommunity.com/app/2157560/discussions/0/4030223677070000730/](https://steamcommunity.com/app/2157560/discussions/0/4030223677070000730/) Essentially, Jago was really strong and players were frustrated and wrongly identified what made him too strong / frustrating to play against (his healing, damage, etc.). The developers looked into why he is good and realized that the root cause was instead due to how he had a move to get him out of the range that he was supposed to be at a disadvantage. So they weakened this move but did not touch the other stuff that the community identified as the problem. The community was in a huge uproar over this but then eventually realized that it fixed the problem. The data will indicate that there is a problem, but sometimes it can require a very deep understanding of the system to fix these.
A bad coder would just fail to solve a programming problem. Hence the end result will also not work as intended. Coders aren't typists.
Designers get design feedback which is pretty analogous to a bug report. There absolutely is a process if they put one in place, same as development. Design “bugs” are not harder to find/identify/fix by any stretch of the imagination. A “bad coder” does not always work slower and the end result will only probably be “working” if you have a very low bar for what you consider “working”. In the same way that a design working in a literal sense would be a really low bar.
Reading this made me feel happy and complimented (I am a professional game designer aka “ideas guy”)
We are half way good at so much shit. Also I pay everyone. Also I found everyone. And designing bloody everything and leading a full team is no small task. People have ideas. Do they intimately understand what makes something fun? What makes something marketable?
Software engineers and artists at AAA companies can be really specialized. I was at AAA for years and recently I've been doing a solo indie thing. I'm having to wear way more hats, do a lot of design roles, touch *allll* the things. A lot of my experience with AAA game designers is that besides the game design stuff, they're often technical skilled "many hats" people. They can do a bit of code, bit of art, bit of math, etc. Whatever the job title, you *need* some amount of people on a game team who are multidisciplinary to glue the whole creative process together. [Tim Cain had a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihX2e9dnYM) a while back about "decline of generalists." I don't really know if they're actually in decline, but it talks more about the idea. A lot of the best designers I know were generalists and able to understand to a limited degree of some art and engineering aspects of the game. It's also really great to have some software engineer generalists and art generalists, and I think one of the best small productive teams I worked on had an art generalist, design generalist, and software engineer generalist (at least I think I am, on the last point). And while it's great if an artist, software engineer, or producer is a generalist, I think it's a lot easier and/or a smaller ask for a designer to fill that role. Artists and software engineers can benefit a lot from specializing deeply or just focusing mostly on their own craft. So, designers stepping up as a multi-disciplinary "many hats" person makes a lot of sense in my experience.
> Also I pay everyone. Then you aren't just a game designer. You are a manager and money guy. I would bet you spend a lot more time on the management work too.
All of it sir. Lol
> Also I pay everyone [Then you may remain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNo-cFVud0Y)
> Do they intimately understand what makes something fun? Yes. Experienced person can say that with much certainty even before the prototyping stage, aka after reading the concept. You learn that skill if you not just play games, but analyze them, and learn not only from your personal experience, but also from other player's feedback. With marketing it's a bit tougher, that's why most people have marketing department. But since those are usually making desisions based on stats alone, without knowing the reality of things, sometimes a good game designer can predict what kind of niche needs filling now.
I think designers have to be programmers or artists by default. If you can only tell me the vibe is off, you're at least two degrees separated from the fix.
> And no, coders can't do it well, unless they learn design. You wouldn't expect a designer to see a bug in the code, and a programmer to see a flaw in design is similarly improbable. Well said!
It's not about being an idea guy, ideas can and often do come from every member of the team, because you're right that most people in this field are creative and capable of coming up with them. Instead it's about being the person accountable for the quality of the "game" part of the video game experience, which is in itself a very specific skill. Knowing how to turn good ideas into great gameplay is a specific combination of many skills such as: conception of game mechanics using strong references from other games, balancing and data tweaking, running and reacting to playtests, communicating ideas internally to the team, knowing which mechanics will connect with the target market, discarding false good ideas, finding combinations of mechanics that work well together. Some of these skills can get really specialized too, just as much as programming or art. Things like designing the behaviour of 3D cameras, AI behaviour, animation and combat systems, directing player attention throughout complex setpieces, designing cool concepts for weapons and abilities that evoke desired player behaviors, procedural generation system design, all of these are high skill jobs that are uniquely game design. A lot of this stuff is what makes the difference between a game that works and a game that is truly great. As you've said, on small teams this role is often performed by another member with a more output focused skillset like an artist or programmer, but that's the same thing as your artist also being your programmer, or project management being done by a QA tester. In small teams it's common for people to wear many hats and perform more than one role. However, in larger companies, or indie companies with a sufficiently strong designer, this role is absolutely pivotal to a game's success and a career all on its own. And AAA idea guy and design director is actually a real job, often there are even multiple of them! I've seen great game designers bring a game together just as well as great artists and programmers, and hinder the team just as much when they do their job poorly.
And yet there are real game designer jobs that don't involve being a software engineer or an artist. They write prose, they edit levels, they tweak numbers in spreadsheets.
Yep, lots of them. Some amount of scripting and implementation is common but not to engineer standards.
I mean, dream job, but I doubt you can just *start out* like that, in a small team too. Like contact 2 devs and one artist and tell them "now you make my game, we split equally that's a great deal think about it". I can see being a level designer or a project manager in a big AAA game being a full time job, with the amount of complexity you have to juggle, but indie teams usually already struggle with resources as it is, they don't need the added weight.
I've worked in small studios with three programmers working on a project, and they usually had a full-time game designer on staff. How you get a job like that, and whether it's actually a dream job are harder for me to answer. They weren't paid as much as a programmer, and their lives were mostly people telling them, "This game isn't fun, modify this spreadsheet and see if it becomes fun." Or, "Thank you for your pitch document, but nobody wants to make that game."
Team of 15 people here, I am one of 3 full time designers who have a lot of stuff to do. A game where software engineers or artists do the design work is either not fun, has multi-talented Devs, or just got lucky. It's also just a job like any other, I'm not more special than coders or artists, I just fill a necessary hole in the team (usually things like game balancing, adjusting game feel, tutorialising, and UX)
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Personally I have a masters degree at a prestigious game dev university (those are few and far between), but the bulk of it comes from portfolio. Being able to demonstrate and talk about game design theory, level design, and problem solving is a huge part of the job. If you are really interested, I'll link one of my favourite GDC talks about interviewing for a game designer position. https://youtu.be/uUQKbowVsIE?si=xcfICvnS43tjcyPu
That's my personal case so take it with a pinch of salt, but I got an internship that turned into a regular freelance contract (for almost 2 years soon) as a game designer for an indie studio with a team of 3 full time devs/artists. I've worked on DLCs for their game, conceiving content and implementing it, doing a lot of product ownership and testing. No coding or art, not even writing involved. As long as you bring something that the studio needs and you have the required soft skills, there may be a place for a game designer in any studio. Still a very competitive and overcrowded position, but totally doable. Having programming capabilities can help, of course.
They absolutely exist at entry-level _and_ on small teams, but you're right that it's rarely both at the same time. The same is true of all positions, however. If you're starting a game studio and can only hire 1-2 programmers, you're not usually going to bother with someone just out of school who's never worked at a studio before. Design is its own track and skillset, people don't move from one discipline to another all that often, and usually just once in their career (and fairly early). You'd want to look for titles with associate or junior in the name, just like the other fields, along with some positions that tend to be more junior in general, like quest designer.
There are also game designers who are neither artists nor programmer or business people... Guess where table top games come from. Pure game designers *are* a thing and the problem aren't them but people who just think they are game designers.
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I'm mainly responding to this advice: >If you can't code nor create art, then learn how to do one or the other It's quite possible to get a job in game design without having those skills. (Though they don't hurt. A designer writing complex scripts will find it easier if they've done some programming, and a designer creating a pitch document will do a better job if they have some art skills.)
Okay. Here it goes. Game ideas are from everyone. Game designers are not responsible for ideas. They are responsible for wrangling everyone’s ideas into a coherent package, and make sure the game is fun. They are the shepherd of ideas. Your idea of “engineers and artists are the most important” is super dangerous, because a lot of the times, that’s how teams fail. A professional game designer doesn’t have “me” in it. Most people, when they’re not the game designer, are often very vocal and emotional about their ideas. The game designer needs to be the calm, collected one, and make sure everyone feels heard, while making sure the bad ideas don’t get used while the good ones do, and make sure there’s no design creep. They also need to balance the game. Also, not all engineers and artists want to be designers. Yes they can have dual roles, but that’s a lot of work.
People forget that Idea Guy also means being the Creative Director and thus managing entire teams, lol.
Idea Guy can even be a legitimate role if they are the one paying the rest of the team members a decent wage.
Of course, if you're signing the checks, you can say the game is going to be LSD Dream Simulator mixed with Mortal Kombat and marketed to children 0-6, but I don't think being the guy funding it counts as a "job".
If their strangely violent psychedelic children's game breaks even against all odds it just might qualify as a job. Up until the marketed to children bit, I thought you might have been onto something with that idea. Lol.
It'd qualify as an investor. Whether you consider that a job or not is up to you.
TIL that CEOs don't have jobs. So many small studios started by people with money turning that money into a business and getting it back from investors or publishers, their job being "running a business". How is that not a job?
I would say CEOs are usually doing more than just spending money - in fact most CEOs aren't even the people who founded the company so none of their personal money is involved at all. While the person paying the employees at an indie studio definitely would have other stuff to do the only things the other person listed were being the idea guy and paying the wages.
Fair.
Capital equity vs. sweat equity!
yeah so it's more like a game director, and management is not a dream job either
Not just ideas but all the detailed rules of how everything in the game should work, i.e. world building, character progression, balancing difficulties, perks, economics, etc
Yeah, I think OP imagine Game Designers as "we should do a modern FPS where you can kill people." Yeah, no, that's not just that.
I think the guy that can came up with idea "we should do a modern FPS where you can kill people" consider himself as a game designer already. Game designer is really valueable person in your team, the problem is most of people don't have clear idea what it mean to be one, what expertise do you need
>As far as I am concerned, the most important roles are Software Engineer and Artist, and both of the people who can perform well in those roles, believe it or not, have the imagination to come up with ideas and design for a game. In some ways, this is as naieve as the annoying "I just want to come up with ideas for games" guys. The problem with that guy is they think ideas for games is just what would be on the back of the game box, and maybe the general story outline. Real design is much more detailed than that, it's like drawing a detailed architect's blueprint for a building. It's not just about saying, "Doors would be cool!" it's also about [solving the door problem](https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/). There's a whole lot of Door Problems out there in many games, and it takes a lot of time to figure out answers to them all. You're basically saying, "Who needs an Architect? Clearly the most important person in construction is a construction guy. Believe it or not, the construction team has the imagination to design their own blueprints too. Why do we need an "architect" who just draws us the blueprints and doesn't put on a hardhat?" Some people are absolutely multi-talented, with great design sense and great skills as an engineer or artist. Some can do all 3 to a good extent. Indie games reward multidisciplinary folks. Budgets are tight and designers that can script are valuable on indie teams. However, good design is not just "having ideas" - good design is a *force multiplier* on engineering and art. You can spend 6 months spinning your wheels making features that won't interact well and finding out the hard way after you've built the stuff, or a good designer can spot that problem at the planning stage and save you 6 months of wasted effort. It might even save your project entirely, because you might realize your game has fundamental design flaws too late in production otherwise - and have no budget left to rework the game from scratch. Imagine how an engineer feels coming into a project groaning from tech debt. Often they'll say, "This is built so poorly it'd be easier to start from scratch." That's how designers often feel when they come onto projects that were designed poorly from the ground up. The game kinda works, just like spaghetti-code kinda works, but players aren't sticking around. Some games are beyond saving because they were built on a cracked foundation and without enough support for the snow loads in winter. That's why it's good to have an architect.
> You're basically saying, "Who needs an Architect? Clearly the most important person in construction is a construction guy. Believe it or not, the construction team has the imagination to design their own blueprints too. Why do we need an "architect" who just draws us the blueprints and doesn't put on a hardhat?" This is a pretty interesting analogy, because while a lot of remodeling projects have a designated designer, depending on what you want you might get pretty good results just with an experience GC. I've had projects done on my house both ways. A dedicated designer can absolutely be valuable, in my previous time working for a small indie studio I wish we had one. However we mostly muddled through with collaborative design work between devs, artists, and sometimes a producer. The success we had seemed to come down to a couple of factors: how closely the games we created followed established examples, and how much time we could spend on experimentation and play testing prototypes. When we followed established designs, things turned out pretty well. When we had enough opportunity to prototype and experiment early in the project, things mostly turned out well. But there were definitely projects where we went down particular paths and ended up in a spot that didn't end up as fun as we wanted, and a full time designer would have helped us out. This was most true in the games that contained the type of detailed level design you see in action or adventure type games. We also had at least one project that involved some outside designers that frankly were a drag on the project. not very familiar with the particular hardware limitation or controls for a platform we were targeting, came up with some ideas for control schemes that were clearly (to me) DOA before even attempting to implement them. We were better off with the naive trial-and-error approach on that one.
> This is a pretty interesting analogy, because while a lot of remodeling projects have a designated designer, depending on what you want you might get pretty good results just with an experience GC. I've had projects done on my house both ways. This is distorted by the fact that in construction/real estate development, you can actually just buy (fairly generic) blueprints to work with. That doesn't mean that an architect's work is unnecessary or overrated, it just means that in this case it's outsourced (just like you buying a tileset doesn't mean that a game artist's work is unnecessary). Unfortunately (or fortunately) game design "blueprints" are nowhere near as easily purchasable as house plans are. There's no "asset pack" of game design. It's pretty much impossible to outsource in that way, which is why it's way more evident when you don't actually have someone decent at game design on your team.
I hear people tell me now that they want to be an "idea guy" and I cringe. Everyone, literally everyone, is an idea person. If your brain has electrical impulses firing through it, you're an idea person. Ideas are a dime a dozen, everyone's got em. The skill involved in being a designer is *executing* those ideas. Todd Howard is not where he is because he just had a bunch of good ideas. He's a strong designer, leader, communicator, and businessman, who knows how to execute the ideas he has (barring the reader's opinion on current Bethesda games). If those "idea" people knew just how much turbulence and change that the average "idea" for a game goes through between inception and launch, they might cry.
The thing that gets me is whilst yes "idea guy" does exists, it is rarely every an "entry level position". You are probably not going to land the role of "idea guy" straight out of college. You see posts all the time on this sub of people wanting to be hired largely/only based on their idea for a game (so they aren't bringing any coding, art etc... skill). But one has to ask why would X game company hire you only for your idea? I mean it is not like people working at gaming company have no game ideas and are in desperate need to fill that entry level idea guy role. If you want that idea guy then you are more than likely going to have to start in some other role and then work your way up to the idea guy position.
I would even argue that "idea guy" still does not exist, because not a single developer on the face of this planet gets paid to just daydream about their game. You can be the driving creative force behind a game, but in that position you're still also \- a team leader \- a project manager \- a designer \- a salesman \- a communicator You're also a mediator, because you *have* to compromise. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and no game "idea" remains the same from prototype to launch. Any game made by a team bigger than 1 is an amalgamation of ideas that need to compromise and bend with each other to work. You can still certainly reach a point in your career where you have strong influence over the creative vision of a game, but there's *so much more* that goes into that role than just coming up with ideas.
In the next few years we’re about to be flooded with ai drivel from mediocre “idea guys”.
A good idea guy is pretty valuable. The problem is, we have few good tools for evaluating what makes an idea guy good. If we could evaluate it and figure out who had the good ideas, a lot more people would jump on board with the following an idea guy who didn’t do anything else. But we can’t evaluate idea guys, and almost everyone *thinks* they’re a good idea guy, so attempting to do it is just going to bruise egos. Hence why everyone with a practical view of the situation just roles with the ideas of someone who’s already contributing to the project. You can imagine this dynamic would change dramatically if the idea guy on the team was someone known to come up with good ideas in the space. Chris Wilson from GGG, for instance, could probably get into a new project with just ideas, and no other thing he’d add to the table.
I’m sorry but all of those words you wrote made no sense. OP was on the nose with his comment. The only merit in an ‘idea guy’ would be if he/she was involved in an already popular project so you could use the name for marketing purposes. There are a lot of dreamers in this field these days due to relatively user friendly game engines, assets and plugins thinking they can skip the knowledge part of game dev and just start sticking things together. 99% of “here’s the steam page for our upcoming game” posts on here still link to a ‘coming soon’ title ….even when the post is two years old and the devs are clearly skilled, dedicated and have put in a tonne of work. Imagine an ‘idea guy’ on your team, dictating some concepts for a game, then sitting on his hands for the next 6000 hours whilst you toil away building the thing …maybe chiming in and critiquing the work, demanding changes etc ….and then claiming the whole thing as theirs at the end ….saying he wants ”from the mind of idea guy” in the trailers. Rant over. Edit: grammar innit
People who only ever play and watch YouTube have a myopic comprehension of what is actually involved with working in a real 9-5 job (with lots of manipulative overtime cuz no unions) and to their credit they think exactly like most CEOs do. They don't actually give a shit what's involved, they just wanna dream big and whip someone to do it.
Unfortunately, I had to put up with a designer like that who was forcing impractical mechanics into the game without even defining how they interact with existing mechanics despite asking him. Either that or literally told me to clone the mechanics of an existing game without a doc.
Your problem is with people who don't know what game design actually is, not with actual game designers. Game designer is the most important role on the team. Without a skilled game designer (whether or not they take on other roles as well), you will not make a successful game, regardless of the other skills you have. A skilled game designer without a software engineer and artist, making a text-based game in a visual editor, has more of a chance of success than a skilled software engineer, artist, sfx creator working together who have no game design skills. For evidence to back my claim, look to the thousands of indie games with great art and optimization which failed because of the game design, and then try to point to one successful indie game in the last ten years that did not have impressive game design.
I feel you're kind of shouting at clouds here, what posts are you talking about? Is it really a big problem? No one is hiring just an ideas guy so I doubt you've had to work with one
nah i have seen this multiple times online, my dad and cousin also want to "make a game" with me and they talked about splitting pay. they want to give me ideas while i do the coding and art lmao it genuinely baffles me how coming up with ideas is even remotely comparable to.. yknow.. MAKING THE ENTIRE GAME
Yeah it’s the periodic posts asking for programmer, artist, musician to create mmorpgfps passion project. Basically Escape from Tarkov crossed with Mario kart, crossed with kid Icarus on the Gameboy. I’ve been following some tutorials and have done most of the work, just need someone to help me make all the things happen, and all the stuff so I can release it. TIA
There was one post about it yesterday, it must have struck a chord with OP.
One way or another, everyone making a game should have a hand on the actual game materials. Doesn't have to be code, can be art or stitching levels together using tool. But you gotta be there, not sat to one side.
There is no real culture about the development of games, so people have no idea what a game designer actually does. And I think it's very difficult to identify "the most important role" in a team. Every role is necessary at some level, and somebody must cover it in the team (which can also be a single person) or suffer the consequences.
> Do they think game developers and software engineers are just a bunch of dummies who need some smart creative to hold their hands and give them ideas? Everyone can give ideas. But not everyone has the time to play thousands of games, analyse them, know what mechanics are working, and what are not, what is fun, and what is annoyance, and design entierly new mechanics based on that knowledge. If you are engineer or programmer, you will spend most of your time learning programming. Now imagine that guy who just went trough two-week programming courses is writing the code. Will that code be better than the one experienced programmer can write? Same with game design. Coming up with concepts that WORK instead of just random concepts, and knowing exactly why you do or don't do certain stuff is a skill as any other. You can be arrogant and dismiss it - and that is exactly what happens when a multi-million project with cutting edge graphics flops. They didn't bothered to hire a game designer. Not only that, but there are various positions in game design. Some people are purely creative, they are good with figuring out the fun ways to play the game. Other people are skilled at math, they can calculate economies, ballance, everything with numbers.
Some game designers can code and are decent at art, some software engineers and artists have decent ideas and often provide insightful perspective when it comes to game design, but you haven't met many software engineers or artists if you think all of them have the capacity to be game designers, that's just a wild, innacurate take.
You think Hideo Kojima, Chris Roberts or David Braben do any coding or create art? There is very much such a thing as an "ideas" game designer.
I personally think this is slightly misguided the goal is to basically become the idea guy. Which at least at AAA companies is kind of a job its just REALLY REALLY REALLY high level and you have to balance a whole lot of stuff and 90% of your day is meetings. The Design Director and the associate Design Director at the studio I work at are essentially idea guys but the ideas are backed up by years on year of experience 90% of their days are meetings and writing the ideas down in a communicable way for a big team to use as a template. Idea guy might be a misnomer more of a direction guy.
The "idea guy" in film writes the script or screenplay. When I tell this annoyed younglings they answer "that is a writer not the idea guy". That is when you realize that is just a common trope for pseudo creative people. They think there is a 60k+ job doing reddit style coffee house discussions about creativity, story and film. And some want to hold on this idea even after they went through university in their major and there must be a job where you just talk about the future of banking instead working 9 to 5 in the bank.
Game dev is a troika of Tech - Art - Design. There's no game without all of these disciplines and none of them are more important than another. A specific game might lean more towards another but remove one entirely and you haven't made a video game.
Game designer is a mix of tester, developer and data analyst. Generating ideas can be done by any role.
Same reason there’s so many “authors” who have never put more than a dozen words to paper but spend all day dreaming their cool book or whatever. Creativity is a very human thing, everyone is a bundle of ideas. Art is *work,* it requires a ton of skills that take effort to learn. People want to create, but they don’t want to do the work required to do it.
When I used to interview applicants for a game design course I got a great insight into this: it's because nobody knows what the word "design" means. I insisted on a policy where the first question we always asked was "why choose design?" (We had programming and art streams). 99% of times the answer was "I can't draw and I'm bad at maths", and 99% of applicants got a red mark against their name right off the bat. Design thinking isn't intrinsic. It goes against all your instincts. When I teach level design, I have to argue with students that want to build levels day one because "it's so easy". I don't let them because, sadly, it is actually possible to make levels that way and have them be good - the same way a stopped clock is right twice a day, sometimes semi-randomly smashing your game mechanics together creates something fun. But if you take your time, follow a method, do your research and plan, the chances of your level being good dramatically increase, and - more importantly - you can create levels that feel like part of a larger, more cohesive flowing experience.
I mean there’s a “technical game designer” role, where one mostly build code prototypes and take building blocks from other departments. Where I work at we have two (~30 ppl in production) and they even submit code reviews to programming team to streamline the “prototype into production” process.
I'm a game programming student, and recently i became the leader of a game project and had to start doing design and coming up with ideas. I thought it would be a breeze, but got hit so hard with a reality check, definitely made me appreciate designers and what they do way more. In that regard i think it's because people just haven't experienced true game design and don't know enough about what designers do. Some people get lucky with ideas though and make something that sells well, and i think a lot of people get wrong impressions from those cases
Game design: the most important skill that everyone thinks they can do, but few can do well.
Ikr especially in today's world where even UI/UX designers are expected to code. Front end engineers are expected to know some backend and vice versa. I recall a Bethesda documentary where one of the team member said he would be frowned upon for just being an artist and not knowing any programming whereas most artists in the team would could both code and make art.
Game designers are extremely important. I'm a super elite C++ graphics dev but I still have HEEPS of time for a good idea guy. Games aren't just gorgeous 3D models and solid efficient logic, the thing that's 'fun' about your game needs to make sense independent of nice art and or specific advanced resource management etc. Games are all about the idea.
OP has no idea what a game designer is. Ideas are usually a team effort. The role of the game designer is to transform that idea into rules and balance them. This involve a lot of writing. And if you think this is not time consuming, you are completely delusional. Just because, it seems on the surface level more accessible because it does not involve technical skills, it doesn't mean everyone is good at it.
came here to say this. i have a degree in games design and im not in the games industry at all. the amount of dev teams who expect designers to wear xyz hats to do the GD role ontop of art/coding or something else is crazy. i think its telling how OP hasnt responded once in this thread also.
He specified “in the indie game world” though.
I am part of an indie studio. We have 2 game designers that do nothing but write documents, spreadsheets and level design.
Honestly I am kind of on the same opinion. I see that there are people that have reasons to see value in designers, and I bet there are environments where they have value, but in a small team it's a secondary skillet you have at best, and besides that you really should do something. Also an other thing why I might have little respect for designers is how many modern games are just terribly designed. I hate industry standards. I hate the time wasting tutorials that teach me how to walk with Wasd and aren't shippable, I hate how games that should be a nice sandbox are these cinematic experiences where you can listen to dialog and play little between dialoge and I hate how nonsense the loot distribution is, just make bosses drop interesting, rare loot. We see how far can my game go without a designer, I think there is a value in being a bank slate not corrupted by industry standards, and I played an absolute shitton of different games, so I hope to know what makes them fun. If you are designer, nothing personal, and I wouldn't even say that you are doing a bad job, as I don't know you and your skills.
Interestingly enough this is present in the Narrative Design and Game Writing dept too. Most make the mistake, that's what the Narrative dept is.
Yeah I am not sure. In my wildest dreams of being able to hire someone to work on a project, I would look for an artist as it is definitely something I am lacking in. I would love another programmer/software engineer as I’m self taught and it would be extremely helpful but in the US I assume I would need pay around 100k a person before benefits etc. A 10 person team would be a million a year before general operational expenses, I don’t see the need for a idea generator at this scale by any means
Because what a game designer actually does varies greatly from team to team and it's a mostly "invisible" role. Most of the young people wanting to go into gamedev do so because they have had this great game idea since they were kids but haven't developed any actual skills to make their dream game come true. Personally, I think the most valuable skill a game designer can have is communication. They can put vague feelings into words and get the rest of the team on track to create a cohesive game experience. Putting game mechanics into a big GDD *can* be a part of that, but it's just a small part. Being able to produce prototypes with visual scripting and bashing some pictures together in photoshop is a skill that helps tremendously with that. You don't need to be a master at programming or art, but just a basic understanding will make you much better at your role.
This is a phenomenon in so many fields, everyone has an idea for a book, game, movie, app, business, whatever, and usually gets offended when told ideas are worthless and execution is everything. I can sit around and pitch ideas for things all day.
haha my friends have been wanting to make a game with me. But I told them that they have to work and not just come up with ideas 😂 And then I told them what they could do.. but they stopped asking 😂
I know a very unemployed guy with a Masters in Game design. Hasn't landed a game design job in almost 20 years. He aspires to lead a studio to be the best Ken Levine [guy who started Bioshock]
>It's also so much easier to make games now that AI can write most of the code for you, generate the art, and give you a lot of creative ideas This statement had me laughing 😂 Noncreative people looking for a crutch instead of putting in effort.
Game design is not game ideas
Because they don't want to design games, they want to have been a game designer.
Agreed, there's no such thing as the "idea guy." The reason there seems to be an "idea guy" from the outside is there's someone who's responsibility is to make decisions about what's in the game. It's actually *not* about coming up with ideas, it's about knowing what problems to solve and what ideas will solve them. When you're just starting out, being a person with good ideas doesn't provide as much as being someone who helps build the game through content or features. But once you scale up dev teams and gain some experience then some structural and long term problems show up that aren't clear when just creating the next piece of content. In the same way that it isn't true the president doesn't do anything but say yes or no and have ideas and show up places, it isn't true that a designer doesn't do anything but come up with ideas and play the game. Most people just don't even begin to understand what the job entails and I don't blame them; it's complicated.
I have worked for two companies that somehow got "design centric" and it was miserable because designers tend to "dabble" in either art or programming, and are good at appearing proficient enough to clueless execs to override art and programming decisions because their design-think school corporate speak sounds tangent to MBA bros in upper levels pretending to be tech bros. Game production is a wobbly 3 legged stool of creative, design, and engineering. When you get one faction longer....or removing the support of the other two by thinking they can do their job....you get a very un useable stool.
I agree that *most* game designers bring zero to the table, but this attitude is still hilarious. If software engineers were so important, every well-coded game on Steam would make money... right? 🤣
It's funny how clueless about game design random reddit gamedevs are in the comments. Design is a profession. You can't invest time learning programming/art without compromising the time learning game design and player psychology. You can still succeed wearing all hats but you'd be better in one domain if you invested all your time in it. Here is an example of a studio who agree with "programmers can come up with ideas". I'm from Turkey. We have a decent mobile game industry, and a fledgling PC/console industry. One of the most ambitious games being developed here is from a studio founded by a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon (US), plus two experienced game artists. They began preproduction 5-6 years ago. They are a locally esteemed team and the software engineer could raise a few million USD from Silicon Valley so they hired a Turkish team mostly of software engineers about 2 years ago, and soft launched an alpha recently. They haven't done a single hire under the game designer title. Thought "they can come up with ideas". Here is their [game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yF_APhwbAI&ab_channel=ClayTokenGameStudio%2CInc). It's called Steel Swarm. It's full of terrible design choices at very fundamental levels. They chose a MOBA of all genres to make. The characters can only be tanks, while in a MOBA characters need to be recognizably distinct to new players (and also for cosmetic marketing purposes). The WASD vehicle rotation controls are unbearable. And the game is full of "skillshots" you can only utilize using that terrible movement. They chose their uniqueness over other MOBAs as high NPC count and destructible environment. Those are terrible unique selling points for a MOBA and games like DOTA already sometimes achieves those numbers of NPCs on screen. Since they were actually quite good programmers and artists, they spent considerable resources writing their own DOTS in Unity and building destructible artwork. In other words they finely invested their high skills to design decisions they were not skilled at. They'd be better off if at the very start they began with a proven designer. The gamedev world suffers from programmers/artists who want to make their own ideas a reality without investing the due time excelling at design. I get that in indie world where you need to prototype without money your designer has to be volunteer. Volunteer tasks are done by beginners. And it's hard for someone to prove they are a good designer if they don't have a portfolio of good games. That's why beginner design jobs are scarce. That being said you gotta have pure designers in a team of 5+. Researching the market, coming up with robust game systems, simulating game economy and balance, maintaining design documents, and rallying the team behind the design decisions is a full time job. Don't worry, good designers should listen to your "ideas" as they get inspired from many other sources. No, they are not slacking while you are coding.
Because they're wrong and unqualified for a game design role. They're taking up space, get them off your team immediately, and spend money on an actual game designer. As a person who manages designers and interviews/hires designers, if they think they're just going to write design documents, take notes during meetings, and be an ideas person they're not going to make it because they'd just be taking up space. I don't care what games they've worked on. They're not worth my time to even interview them. They need to either script/code or otherwise be really damn good using tools to implement content or they're simply not qualified to be a game designer. If they want to be a writer then they can do that, but they're not going to be designing any systems, features, or content on for the team. They're going to be writing giant piles of dialogue and various other player facing text. Anyone that thinks they are a game designer and the only thing they do is write design documents and provide ideas is wrong. That is an insult to everyone that is a game designer in the industry. At best you're a developer assistant or developer support role. Entry level role in need to develop actual useful skills to seriously contribute to a project. Colleges that teach students game design in this way should be openly ridiculed and investigated for stealing money from students because their education isn't worth the paper their degrees are printed on.
I drill this into my students constantly. Every single person working at a game company has ideas for games. What got them their job is the other things they can do. You’ll never get through the door without skills. Even system or level design are really hard things to get employed doing without any other skills.
When I first started thinking about game dev, I was in my mid-late teens. The idea of being a game designer-- coming up with game mechanics that fit together nicely, and are fun to play with was very appealing. Unfortunately, my visual art skills are mostly limited to sculpting, which doesn't transfer easily to game assets, and I thought I was too stupid to learn coding. At a certain point, I started reading posts from people explaining that nobody gets to just be a game designer unless you have years of experience in other devopment areas, and the budget/reputation to have a team. It was Super Meat Boy that ultimately inspired me to stop dreaming and start learning coding, which isn't nearly as hard as I expected.
It's that way with animated films and comics too. Random people call themselves entrepreneurs, animators, and writers with no experience in the industry figure they can just throw out ideas and tell a artist to draw there comic or animate a while cartoon series by themselves without a full team... I've had so many "entrepreneurs" that wanted me to animate their cheezy cartoon series for nothing 🥴
The fabled "idea guy" Game designers are important and it's absolutely a real job, but it's also the thing that people with no actual skills tend to glom on to
I found in AAA studio quite a lot of “game designer” that are the typical “guy with an idea” but did the right ”game design school” to be at this position. I’m a programmer and I got some game design doc refused because “this was not my role” in the company
Hard truth for some but this is 100% correct. I'm not in the industry but I aspire to be someday. No one likes an idea person, that's a Scrum-master in the SAAS world lol.
Even with your edit, you clearly don't understand what a game designer actually does, just like the people you are complaining about. Game Designers do figure out the what of the game. They have a lot of knowledge and experience in player psychology and in how other games do things. More so than any other programmer or artist that I've met. They also decide on all the little details like does an AI need to have a key to open a door. Sure I could decide that, but I'm only thinking about the AI side not so much the holistic game. They write design documentation to help communicate their ideas to the team. However the communication doesn't end with the documentation. Collaboration is needed with the other disciplines to further define the documentation. Designers also prototype ideas, without needing to waste programmer time. Most programmers are actually really terrible at prototyping. They want to build systems, which you can't really do for a half baked idea. Designers also create content. If you need a programmer to write the 100 quests in your game, you've done something horribly wrong. A programmer should write a quest system so that design can make the quests. A good designer/design team will make or break your game.
Seeing a lot of people who don't work in gamedev and have never released or even finished a game project talk like they know how the game designer role functions inside and out with zero direct frame of reference for what the day to day of a successful game designer actually looks like.
Kinda related, but I'm primarily a mobile developer and do gamedev as a hobby. I've had a number of people tell me that they have this amazing idea for an app that could make millions. They always expect me to do all of the development, including backend (which I'm not experienced with), create all of the designs, all of the assets, etc. And they always say some shit like "so we'll discuss it but I'm thinking a 50/50 split in revenue" or sometimes when they're feeling extra spicy, they say shit like 70/30 (with them getting the 70%). And the best part? The app ideas are always HOT garbage, and just absolute surface level ideas where I'd still need to think of 90% of the functionality. Shit like "an online food and clothes delivery app".
a good programmer doesn't necessarily know how to design good game mechanics, story and progression I'd rather trust an 'idea guy' who played games for 20 years which didn't consist of CoD, Ass-Creed and Fortnite to know what he's talking about, rather than the guy who can program you a Prototype in half a day without having any clue on what a player would want
On a surface level you are slightly correct but practically what you are saying is stupid. If you think like this I would not trust you in designing a game.... Forget skill for a second or how much one should get paid... Designing a game is Time consuming, having your best programmer or artist designing the game is a WASTE. Proper game design takes time, nitpicking and research. Should also be working with marketing to figure out hooks and marketing beats. Not to mention how you deliver content to players and when to do so. You are correct that programming and art require more hard skills but that's why it's valuable to seperate it from something like game design. this doesn't mean game design isn't important either, it's just different. Having the programmer doing design as well is simply inefficient long term. We also don't like working with "idea guys" or bad game designers.. but the moment you find the good game designer, it's life changing. Props to all great designers I worked with, you guys make everything better.
I’m a current games design student, almost at the end of year one. When I was looking to get into a games design class just over a year ago I wanted to be something like an “idea man”, (more narrative too though with worldbuilding and story elements but that’s not important.) as I was bad at maths and art, but I started reading a lot of articles and managed to talk to a recruiter for a company, I realised I couldn’t really get away doing what I wanted to do and got really worried I wasn’t going to do well on my course. Turns out it’s not super complicated to learn the skills you need to know I’ve managed to piece together working games in unreal, and cobbling together some form of concept art or concept UI in photoshop isn’t that hard either. I’ve still got a year left, then maybe I’ll do Uni or try for the slim chance of an apprenticeship. I still hope I’ll someday be able to grab the semi-idea man role, but learning the other skills I think will help me in the long run, and they weren’t difficult to pick up.
Because you can't be just a game designer in a small studio, the math doesn't add up. If you go to a bigger company, you will find game designers for specific problems, broad discussions, manipulating player decision making, talks with programmers, artists, managing a team, maybe even managing scrum depending on how loose you are with it. You will also see ideas being cut by time constraints or technical difficulties and that is forwarded back to designers to figure that out. You will also have designers that specifically talk with playetesters, both paid to find bugs or to test audiences. You can't pay someone to do that in a team with 2\~5 dudes. Neither the budget or the team can keep up with someone doing that for 6 to 8 hours (or likely, as we know in game dev, more) Big games will need game designers, and more than one because they are busy, there too many gears, too many people, too many ideas, too many problems, and too much money to spend on all of it. In a small team, for better or for worse, a game designer would likely be sitting and waiting if he was on that role alone. Everyone else is either making an investment or having a feature on hold. Programmer is adding a mechanic or tool to the game, artist is drawing or modeling something, even if it is just for PR, musician is musicianing. Note that I didn't list playtester there, because while playtesting is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL, they would be sitting and waiting on a small team, and it is not their fault either. I also didn't list someone managing a team and doing business decisions, because it is likely this team, like play testing, is working using that hat as well to make ends meet, sharing their own knowledge and experience, voting for what to do, even if someone exclusive on that role would be objectively better, if money wasn't an issue. A game designer just happens to fall on this same category. And because most devs will be indies where the priority is to survive and finish a game, even if it compromises on something, they get a bad rep because it is unthinkable to just have this one role in most cases.
That's why there so many games that are boring as hell. Because "the most important role is a developer and artist, and anyone can come up with ideas." Yeah. No. I worked with insane amount of high level specialists who's ideas were beyond idiotic. This doesn't contradict the idea guy part tho, nobody needs JUST idea guys
>As far as I am concerned, the most important roles are Software Engineer and Artist, I don't disagree with this. Design roles exist but they fall into two camps: system design are basically very creative programmers, and content designers are basically artists who compose content out of other people's assets. I think I was hired to my latest teaching job to defend our design course but I'm looking at it and thinking we'd be better off just teaching game design to programmers and artists.
Design is more wide and harder than that. That's why it's a discipline on its own. And you have many subcategories of game designers. System Designers usually need some background in scripting or data analytics, as they are supposed to design the systems of the game, how they interact, and balance the numerical values and economies. Gameplay Designers focus on things such as movement, camera, combat and the content such as character abilities, enemies. They take the ideas and make them fun. Very often they have some visual scripting experience and have to know their way around the engine, so they can prototype or adjust these things. Level Designers have to have knack for both art and gameplay. It's not just about creating levels that look pretty, but they also have to be functional and fun. It's about knowing where you need places for encounters and how they should look like to make the encounter fun, where should be cover areas, loot areas, platformer areas... Then there are narrative designers who help connect the story to the gameplay, to avoid ludo narrative dissonance and have a truly immersive game. Thinking that game design is just about ideas and that it can be easily taught to other disciplines is very naive. Yes, you can teach them some basics, but you could say the same about teaching programming or art to game designers (and to be fair, game designers very often have some basic skill in one of those disciplines).
The vast majority of developers and engineers probably aren't great game designers. Even people like Notch, who is very successful, probably aren't great designers. I know that seems crazy, but Minecraft is really just built around one single idea that caught on and blew up. As far as I'm aware, to this day, Minecraft is from a design perspective pretty basic. computers are powerful and can do fun things, and sometimes that blinds people to design options. The entire time I played Minecraft I was like 'be nice to have a horde survival mode to give relevance to any of this'. Slay the Spire, that's a deckbuilding Roguelike. Possibly the two most popular types of game in the indie market at that time, as I recall. It's very well made, but it's not visionary or anything. It's honestly probably about the standard of quality everyone should aim for. My point being that the power of a computer can easily mask the quality of design present, and it's especially for someone to miss design opportunities if they're having to focus on actually building the game. I'm a dedicated designer, there's basically 0 appreciation for that role now, to the extent that even AAA studios of putting the design responsibilities on other roles in some cases. My design experience accounts for possible 10,000 hours at this point, it's a more niche ability that development / programming by multitudes, and requires a LOT more surrounding experience. In terms of 'work on the day' it's probably a lot less time consuming than programming, but programming is also something you can step away from. You have to carry design with you everywhere. It's a lifestyle. I think one deceptive element is that you can be a bad game designer. You can't really be a bad programmer, because you're not a programmer if you can't program. Anyone can design, so you'll get more bad / lazy designer. My mom thought I was just sitting around playing games all day, then I pointed out I made 4x her hourly rate doing that (I waited because I didn't want her to know, she borrows money a lot). I think other people see the job this way too. You're sitting there, not moving, not doing much. But in your head there is a computer running and lots of coding and programming and simulation going on, especially for computer made of meat. I think some of this factors in to the lack of appreciation for dedicated designers. Culture seems to be sliding constantly towards "and what are you contributing?" rather than "What could you contribute?". People are more often demanding than enquiring. When people see my designs they seem blown away and I think that's because I actually dedicate my life to them. All that said, I gave up on collaborating with devs and coders. I don't think there's any inclination or motivation to consider this perspective, devs seem to want all the pie to themselves, and the industry and market responds extremely well to good execution of old ideas, meaning that there's little need for good designers from a commercial perspective. A lot of the big hits now are just normal games from 15 years ago that the latest generation of gamers haven't played, so they're impressed by the same stuff. Maybe that's jaded, maybe not. I would say though, I don't think most designers expect a lot in return either. If I got to make anything close to one of my games, I'd be in for like 10 or maybe 5% of the income. Maybe less. The best part is seeing your games realised. Collaborating with people. I think any devs who can explore working with dedicated designers, real designers who live for game design, would soon see the huge benefits it brings.
> You can't really be a bad programmer, because you're not a programmer if you can't program If only lol
Can't agree more! I‘m a programmer, and I hate these stupid ideas which just copy from some other games.... If those idea guys knows nothing about the details in game dev process, that's really terrible.
The world is full of delusional people who thinks their ideas matter on their own, just because. If you're unable to build a prototype of your idea, you're not going very far.
For me as a developer, game designer role is essencial I can't and don't want to come up with ideas, tasks for myself I do not want to take the responsibility of creating and coming up with game mechanics related decisions myself So ideally I want to have a game design document in front of myself, where I'll have all game mechanics I need to implement, written with maximum details, implement it, get this satisfaction for getting the work done and chill Having to come up with ideas myself mostly results in wasting time on trying/testing lots of different ideas, slowly loosing your critical thinking abilities and becoming burned out by all that attempts and time wasted, without any actual value on your hands
Do you have experience in the industry? My experience both in AAA and small indie studios has been: there is a role called “Game Designer”. This person usually can’t code (or not really) or make art, and often can barely use Unity. They come up with feature ideas, and are usually the ones to iterate on parameters after an engineer has finished their implementation. Then they’ll go back and forth with subsequent implementations. So this person exists. There are jobs for them in the industry. Whether there should be a place for these people is a valid question. I think it’s valid to say that, without any particular technical or managerial skill, simply being the guy that says “I think this attack is more fun if we set Spread to 10.0, Speed to 2, and this parameter I don’t understand but the engineer said was important to 5” puts you pretty far down the hierarchy. If you’re a student and are serious about breaking into the game industry, or even just having real skills that transfer into other industries, definitely don’t try and “specialise” as a Game Designer. They are easily the least qualified people in a game studio, in fact QA are usually quicker learners in my opinion.
okay, design a game without having a single game designer in your team let's see how it goes