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How NOT to become a Game Designer

Game designers are not born, game designers become


In this article I’ll talk about what you need to do in order not to become a game designer, what studios expect from game designer candidates, what kind of test tasks are and how not to complete them, what questions are asked at an interview for a game designer position and about their steps towards this goals. The article may also be useful to recruiters of development studios. (+ links to other useful articles and resources that helped me)



1. The image of a game designer


So, we start from scratch. This means that we have nothing but love for games and the desire to make them. This is the default. Even a rich gaming experience is not so important. To get started, you need to find out, or clarify what the game designer is doing. All the necessary information can be found in this wonderful article . There is a popular image of a game designer as a person who invents masterpieces every day (today Assassin's Creed, tomorrow BioShock), hangs out with Kojima on weekends, and in the evenings gives advice to Blizzard guys about mechanics that should be added to their fresh project. But the mundane image of the game designer corresponds to a person sitting at the table for 8 hours a day in order to optimize the mechanics of the interaction of a diamond, a banana and a first-aid kit so that the player does not switch to competitors.

2. Gaining knowledge


When we have formed an idea of ​​a game designer and we can associate ourselves with this image, we need to get basic knowledge and skills. The book has proved itself to be the best source of knowledge. It is difficult to find a format where the information would be as structured and systematized as in books. The format of the online article is not able to cover the subject in the right amount, but video tutorials ... to be honest, I can’t say anything about them, notify me if there are any high-quality ones. Habré has a good selection of seven books for those who want to become a game designer. I started with the book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" by Raph Koster. The book does not provide any specific applied knowledge, it is more about the philosophy of game design and about the features of the human brain, but I wildly liked it.

3. Getting skills


Skills must be acquired in parallel with knowledge. We all know what a theory is worth without practice. The practice of game design is game development. If we are talking about a computer game, then we need a game engine (a platform for developing games). The choice is represented by three mastodons in the form: Unity , Unreal Engine , GameMaker: Studio (in fact, there are many more, just these most popular and affordable). My personal choice fell on Unity, because it is used by many studios, there are a large number of training materials, and it is believed that it is better suited for beginners than Unreal Engine.

Getting skills at Unity is easy. The official website has a training section, where you are provided with templates of ready-made games of various formats and guides for their modification. This is what you need, because the modification, improvement and maintenance of ready-made games is just what a novice game designer will most likely do. I also took up the book “Unity in action. Multi-platform development in C # ”, because I wanted to try Unity development from scratch and write code with my hands. I do not recommend the book to anyone, it contains a lot of typos, and, due to the constantly evolving Unity, it quickly loses its relevance. Many features described in the book already work very differently.

4. Get into the game development environment


Sitting at home, reading books, gaining Unity skills is, of course, good, but nothing, I repeat, nothing develops you so much as working as a team of experienced people. The opportunity to ask for advice, to see how other employees work, to receive instruction from a professional is more expensive than any training courses. I worked in various fields, where I came as an inexperienced person, and received much more skills and applied knowledge in the first month of work than from books, video lessons and lectures at the institute. “We need to find a team ready to take an intern or, as they say in IT, a junior ,” I thought.

You should immediately drop a few words on the topic “work as a tester, then you will become a game designer”. In fact, these words simply reflect the tendency that many testers in the process become game designers. I believe that in no case can you use this as an action plan, because:

Firstly, the phrase sounds just as ridiculous as "work as a tire technician to break into the auto industry, and then you’ll start sorting the engines as you wanted ". These are two fundamentally different positions. Although the position of the tester requires a creative approach, its focus nevertheless falls on finding bugs. When I worked as a tester, it all mattered to everyone “how, in my opinion, you can make the game better” , this is exactly what the gay designers are doing. The tester is required to find out “what the game does not work as the game designer intended” and"What spoils the player the impression of the game . "
And secondly, this is a banal disrespect for the head of the testing department, who takes you to his team of testers. The testing department should not be a hallway for game designers with a large turnover of staff, IMHO .



5. Test task for the game designer


And now we have already made a resume and sent it to various studios with vacant positions as a junior game designer. How to make a resume, what to write, where to look for these very studios is a separate topic, let's not talk about it. When the resume has been viewed, a test task arrives in the mail. And sometimes, before sending the task, HR will contact you by phone to make sure that you are an adequate person and in general know what a game designer is, work, conditions, an employment contract. And here is what you can expect and how to deal with it:

Test task from the Yekaterinburg studio Targem Games


The task itself looks like this , and at the time of February 25, 2020 it requires the following from us:

  • Come up with how you can improve the combat mode of the game Gods of Boom and arrange everything in the form of a design document.
  • Distribute artifacts as a reward among missions based on given conditions and give an explanation of your decision.

To complete the first task, you need to find out what a design document is and how to write a design document . A query in Google issues a large number of articles on writing dzdoka manuals , but I could not effectively use any of them. Moreover, even a brilliant example in the face of a dzdok and the concept of “Ryaba Kurochki” did not help me. I just realized that dazdocks are completely different, and the requirements for them vary, and I completed the task in this way . I received
such a feedback :
Rather, it is a set of ideas, not a design document.
The ideas are good, there is visualization in the form of mockups, that's ok, but we expected to see a more detailed study of the selected aspects.

Well, to complete the second task, you need the skill of owning Google Sheets. This is truly one of the main skills in the entire game dev. Everyone I know about works on Google Sheets.
This is how my decision and my explanation of the completed task look like .
I received such a feedback:
The table is normal. You can have more explanations, more sections (not all in one table), more formulas, at least. The decision is generally correct, although there are dubious points. For example, half of the missions need to be completed only once, and the fourth - 6 times, from the point of view of balance, this is not good.

It is worth noting that I completed the task in 2 days, and the feedback came to me after 16 days, although it would seem that checking the task is easier than completing it. In general, I agree with the remarks; I am not afraid to make mistakes and can admit my mistakes. How else would I find out that I am doing something wrong. Only he who does nothing is not mistaken. You too, consider my mistakes and move on.

Spoiler
, ,

Test task from the Volgograd studio Kefir! Studio


The task sheet can be downloaded here and at the time of 03/18/2020 it requires the following from us:

  • A link to the gameplay video of your prototype game.
  • Analysis and suggestions for fixing the game Last Day on Earth.
  • Concept document of a mobile game, which should become the most profitable in the USA.
  • And all sorts of other things ...

In fact, as a result of the interview, I realized that your prototypes of games are the most important thing that is required of you, the rest of the tasks were not even mentioned. I dare to suggest that this is not important. Since I only recently mastered unity and cannot freely implement my ideas in it, what I showed in the video is more about experiments in the framework of my acquiring skills and acquaintance with Unity than prototypes of games that meet the evaluation criteria. I decided it was better to show at least something than not to show anything. Actually, you can see the result .

The task of analyzing the game and suggestions for improvement is already familiar to us and quite understandable for implementation. Just leave a link to my result .

But I would like to dwell on the concept in more detail. Our challenge is to come up with a game for a specific purpose and for a specific market. A definite goal is the most profitable (top grossing), a definite market is the USA. All this analytics is revealed by the wonderful free Sensor Tower service . You can select the country, application category, operating system, and so on. And also the leader in analytics in the field of mobile applications is App Annie . This is a very expensive service used by interested publishers, but I downloaded a very informative document with mobile market analytics for 2019 for free., which certainly helped fulfill the task set before me. It is clear that the game that makes the most money is not at all a genre or setting, but if you look at the statistics, you can see the trend that the most money-making games are casual puzzles with cartoon graphics and old mechanics. Here's a game I got, I didn’t come up with anything new, I took the basic mechanics from the old Da Vinci Secret game from Alawar.

It is worth noting that the studio responds and checks the task quite quickly, but, unfortunately, they did not give me any feedback on the task, they only wished good luck in finding a job. This is strange, because luck will help me much less than a good feedback.



6. Interview


And after the successful execution of the test job comes it . Perhaps your only opportunity is to make a good impression and convince the employer that he needs you. This is very exciting. To make it harder for you to enter into a stupor, I will give a number of questions that can be asked:

  • Who is a game designer and what does he do?
  • Why do you want to work as a game designer?
  • What kind of game designer would you like to be?
  • What does the “retention” metric show and how is it measured?

The correct answer: This is the retention rate of players in the game, measured in percent, is elementarily determined by the ratio of the number of players who re-entered the game after its first launch to the number of players who have not entered.

  • What are your main game design achievements and where did they lead you?

Wrong answer: Well, what can an inexperienced beginner achieve? My main achievements are that I mastered unity and came up with the concept of the game as a result of completing a test task.

  • Why don't you have game prototypes? If you want to be a game designer, you have to sit at home and stamp prototypes.

Wrong answer: It doesn’t make much sense to sit at home and develop games that no one will play. Making solo games as a green rookie outside the team is as effective as explaining the physics of cutlets. In the best case, your friends will play them for about 10 minutes, which is several times less than the time that you spent on development.

  • What are the names of game designers and the names of studios that inspire you.
  • Questions on gaming experience and game erudition, which in total, probably, do not affect anything.
  • Why do you want to work in our studio?

The correct answer must be sincere. You must first answer this question for yourself before submitting your resume. Asking this question, I eliminated several studios that offered juicy places for interns for game designers. At my interview, I replied like this: You have shameful projects, you are ready to take a junior.

To summarize


Development studios expect ready-made prototypes of games from you. Not a concept, not an idea, but a playable prototype of the original game.

You should not send a summary of only one company and hope that they will take you there. You just spend your time. I’m an infantile person, I needed to step on the rake twice to learn a lesson. If you send a resume to only one company that attracts you the most, you will drive yourself into a situation where the company is one for you and you are one of a dozen for the company. The labor market is still a market with its own rules and laws. My advice: do not waste time sending to a few suitable, albeit less attractive, posts.

If you followed the steps in this article, then you most likely will not become a game designer. The author did not succeed, which means that something is wrong here. I just wanted to share my experience, with the expectation that this will come in handy for someone, that this article will warn you against failures (warned means armed), and to summarize all my knowledge about how not to become a game designer.

Quote from the classics:
Looking at the mistakes of others, you can do everything differently.
To never make them.
But unfortunately we don’t know how to
be. Being a bad example is much more fun!

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