10 tips for novice game designers

What every game designer should remember, – James Youngman, who participated in the development of games such as Crimson: Steam Pirates, Murdered: Soul Suspect and Paradise Bay, told in his material on Gamasutra. Our friends from SoftPressRelease translated his article into Russian.

Art: Crimson: Steam Pirates

This month (December 2015) I am celebrating the 10th anniversary of working as a professional game designer. I have learned a lot over the years and, taking this opportunity, I want to share my experience so that novice game designers can get down to business right away, and also so that in another ten years I can see what else I have learned. So, without further ado, here are ten lessons I’ve learned in ten years of working in game design.

1. Gemdesign – the art of contextualization

During my first interview for a game designer job, one of the interviewers said one phrase that sunk into my soul: “The job of a game designer is not to generate all kinds of ideas, but to select good ones.” Later I came to the conclusion that this is the truth.

There is no profession of “idea generator”; you are not the only one who will come up with ideas for the game, and you will have to make efforts to implement all these ideas.

Yes, yes, those who work with you will constantly have ideas for the game. Do not dismiss the opinion of “non-game designers”. Such destructive arrogance has no place in a team environment.

What you will need to do is evaluate ideas – it doesn’t matter if they are invented by you, other game designers, the rest of the team members or playtesters. Plus, you will constantly have to choose which ones are suitable for the game and can be implemented using the resources you have.

This is the real “ideological” skill of a game designer.

Important: it is impossible to determine whether an idea is good or bad in isolation from the context. If I ask you if a player needs the ability to jump in a game I’m working on, you shouldn’t have an answer. You don’t know what kind of game I’m doing and therefore can’t assess whether it needs the ability to jump. Context in game design is everything. Evaluate ideas accordingly.

2. If everything else is equal, choose a simpler design

There is always a desire to make a system or formula more complex, but if we take such a step, we need to understand: we do this for ourselves, not for the players. If a complex design [with its massiveness] obscures [the functionality that was possible thanks to it], then what is the benefit from it? Complex design solutions are difficult to present to players, so their implementation should be due not just to the fact that they, de, will improve the game. The new feature should offset the increase in the threshold for entering the project.

Thinking about the features in game design, I like to give here an analogy with the weight of cargo on a spaceship. The approximate cost of launching something into space is $2,300 per pound, so if you add cargo, you need to be firmly confident that it will benefit by reaching orbit. It’s the same with game design: teaching players to understand fancy systems is unreliable and costly. You better be sure that you are giving players something valuable in return for the time they will spend on training [and most importantly, players should understand the value of their efforts].

3. Innovation is an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary one

In the gaming industry, special attention is paid to innovation, but, in fact, there are not so many of them.

Remember your favorite innovative game.

What exactly is innovative about it? What proportion of events is innovative, and what is standard? How much does the innovative aspect differ from everything that appeared on the market before the release of this game?

Most likely, remembering your innovative title, you will find a game that is standard in its mechanics with several interesting features.

My point is that a slow, evolutionary approach to innovation is extremely valuable and leads to progress more often than others. We game designers often get hung up on trying to reinvent the wheel, but it’s a waste of effort. Use the experience of your predecessors so that you can focus your efforts on one or two innovative features with which you want to do something new and interesting. Creating and polishing innovations, as well as training players, is the most time–consuming process, so you will have to put a lot of effort into working with them.

After that, be prepared for another game to come out and present a more polished version of your innovative feature. It may seem annoying to you, but it’s worth taking it as a compliment: your design served as a source of inspiration, and your colleagues in the workshop learned a lesson from your efforts and, thereby, improved the industry as a whole.

4. Game development – social experience

My screenwriter friend once said: “If you want full creative control, write a novel.” Remember this.

Games are developed together, and it doesn’t matter how wonderful your vision is, how clearly you convey it, and how enthusiastically the team accepts it. The resulting game will differ from your vision, both because of the realities of production, and because everyone who develops the game leaves their imprint on it.

And that’s good. We work in an industry where we are surrounded by smart, creative, experienced and loving people. What a luxury! Instead of wasting away over your ideas, like a Koschey on gold that he can’t spend, freely share your thoughts with the team, and let them change them, form and sometimes be replaced by other people’s ideas. Remember, the goal is to make the best game, not the game that most closely matches the designers’ desires. You can’t do it alone, and trying to do it is a whim. Take for granted that your team members have different opinions from each other.

By the way, social skills are important for a game designer. There is a stereotype that since game developers are geeks, no one will care about your limping social skills if you do your job well. This is a myth. The truth is that you will spend a lot of time working with other members of your team, often in quite stressful conditions. Good social skills will certainly come in handy here.

Also remember that for every job you will ever try to get, other people with skills no worse than yours will apply, so the distinguishing factor will be the ability to work better in a team. This team may have at least one person who has already worked with you before. Did you work well or badly with him as a team? What will he say about you to a recruitment specialist?

5. Approaches to game design can be different

There is no one right way to make a good game. Just like there is no one sure way to be a good game designer. You will work with people who approach design problems in a radically different way from yours, and none of you will be wrong. Keep this in mind when you start arguing with them about design. All of you are trying to solve the same problems and try to give the players the best experience. You’re on the same team.

If you have a similar conflict, you should step back and discuss your approach to design. This will help you contextualize seemingly strange decisions and make the best strategy. Remember, winning is not about proving the superiority of your design. Winning is about giving players the best experience. Your approach is not superior to the others. It has pros and cons, just like the approach of any other experienced game designer. Use such conflicts as an opportunity to learn new things and develop as a game designer.

6. “Interesting to develop” and “interesting to play” are different things

There are a lot of interesting things in the work of a game designer, and that’s good. However, understand: what you are interested in creating and what gamers are interested in playing are not always the same. That’s okay; it’s still a job, so it’s important to always choose what players like to play rather than what you like to do. The players don’t care that you enjoyed creating something; they have no way of knowing about it, and even if there was, it wouldn’t matter. They want the game you created to entertain them, and your job as a game designer is to provide them with that.

7. You will refuse the developments that you are rightfully proud of

There’s no way to sweeten this pill. This will happen. It will hurt you every time. The best thing you can do is accept [before you suddenly realize it] that this kind of practice is an integral part of your life as a creative person. It’s not your fault; in most cases, it’s nobody’s fault. The game project is constantly changing, and things that were completely logical for the previous version may become meaningless (see point 1).

But don’t despair! Everything you have learned in the process of creating ideas rejected in the end gives you additional experience and sharpens your designer skills, therefore, you will start the next version / project with a lot of knowledge. In this way, conditions are created in which you can do something better than your previous creation.

8. Everything you learn makes you better

Here are some random facts. Kamchatka crabs are not real crabs, besides they are cannibals. The Deshler cocktail is named after a lightweight boxer. Why do I know these facts? Because I’m a game designer. I explain in more detail.

We, by and large, are engaged in simulating reality. The better you understand something, the better you will be able to simulate it, and, in fact, determine what is needed and what should not be added to the simulation (see point 1). This means that the more we know about the world, the wider our design palette. So set a goal to learn as much as possible. Travel, listen to educational podcasts, find a hobby. Actually, you should do it anyway; it will make you a fully developed personality. For game designers, however, this is especially important because it gives us the fuel we need to create good games.

9. Avral is an exceptionally destructive force

People are trying to romanticize the emergency. The team, united in a passionate outburst, gives its best with a united front in order to make an excellent game out of a good one on the eve of the looming deadline. Teamwork grows stronger, the quality of the game takes off, and the team manages to complete and exceed the tasks, while meeting deadlines.

These are all fairy tales. The team will produce steadily deteriorating results, creating bugs faster than they can fix them. Lack of sleep will kill motivation and take away the mental and physical strength needed to develop games. Together, these two factors will make team members quarrelsome and vindictive. Your health and personal life will suffer. You will find yourself in a money trap, sometimes in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars, and in the end you will get a game of worse quality than if everything had been properly planned and went according to schedule initially.

Avral is poison, and the spread of romantic fairy tales is an attempt to cash in on the enthusiasm and naivety of inexperienced developers. Don’t be fooled. This is an exploitative and destructive damage on the body of the industry, which must sink into oblivion so that the industry and the surrounding reality continue to grow in scale and quality.

10. No one knows what game designers do

Most of the people I meet can be divided into two groups depending on their reaction to the fact that I am a game designer. The first ones first ask if I’m a programmer, and then they ask if I’m an animator. The latter ask the same questions, but in a different order. Attempts to clarify what exactly designers do were difficult for me. The best thing I could come up with was to ask people what their favorite game is, and then explain what the game designers did in this game, but this is a clumsy way.

I want to make it clear – I’m not making fun of these people. Game design is a fairly new profession, most of us are concentrated in several large cities (and their environs), and we work in a rather closed industry. Add to this the breadth of the concept and the abstractness of the term “game design” (I used to say that I create rules and content, but no one understood what I meant), and you know, it’s not surprising that many people don’t understand what we do. Just be prepared for a similar reaction even from hardcore gamers.

I hope that for those of you who are at the beginning of your game design path, these recommendations will be useful; I know that they helped me. There is no need to consider this list exhaustive.

A source: http://gamasutra.com