Why did ZeptoLab hold a game designer contest?

From January 26 to February 23, an open Game Designer Challenge competition was held on the Internet. It was conducted by the Moscow company ZeptoLab, known for a series of mobile chatterboxes Cut the Rope about a cute animal Am-Nyama. Yesterday, the company officially summed up the results of the competition.

The competition consisted of three stages. The first was a test, in the second and third there were creative tasks, like “suggest one change or addition to the rules of football that will make it more interesting and spectacular” or “come up with games about making a duvet cover.”

And if the test questions were evaluated automatically, then the creative ones were judged independently by three jury members. Each of them gave a certain score for the answer. The final score was average,” Semyon Voinov, creative director of ZeptoLab, told us.

Only 50 people reached the final stage. Not so little, considering that of the 2,100 who took part in the competition, only 29% of game design is the main profession. The main struggle, according to Semyon, unfolded in the top ten: “until the very end, we ourselves did not know who would be the winner. But in the end, there was quite tough competition in the top ten.”

Most of all there were contestants from Russia – 1271 people. However, this did not affect the results. Not a single Russian entered the top three winners. “According to our feelings, the average level of Western game designers is still higher than domestic ones,” Warriors commented on this, but he also noted that there were “a lot of our compatriots in the Top 50.”

There were several goals for the contest, which ZeptoLab prepared for three months with the help of four employees (manager, game designer, graphic and web designers). The first was the desire to “shake up the industry, hold a bilingual competition so that participants would have the opportunity to compare themselves with colleagues from other countries.” The second was more practical: “we wanted to gather contacts of the most powerful representatives of the profession for possible prospects of cooperation.”

To our question whether it is now worth waiting for offers to those who got into the Top 50, Voinov answered as follows: “good game designers are often hunted, for them it is unlikely that something will change. But for beginners, it really can be an impetus to start a successful career.”

By the way, after the end of the competition, the topic of the possibility of using ZeptoLab questions in an interview for the position of a game designer was raised in Russian social networks. But, according to Semyon, “it is not necessary to consider these questions and answers to them as a universal tool for assessing game design skills. This is just our subjective vision, and, as some participants correctly noted, the answers to many questions depend very much on the context.”

By the way, only 8% of the participants are women. Warriors attributes this to the fact that “at the moment, the profession of a game designer is generally predominantly male, apparently this is due to the fact that when we were all growing up, games were designed mainly for a male audience.” He also noted that “now the gender situation in the industry is changing, and I think it’s for the better.” Of the 50 people who reached the final, three are girls.

Whether the company will hold similar contests in the future is unknown. But the beginning, in their opinion, turned out to be inspiring.