Getting a Job in the Games Industry - Part 4
This is part four, and the final entry for now, of my series on getting a job in the gaming industry. In this post I’m going to focus on my chosen discipline: design.
Always be designing
“I really want to be a game designer.”
“Great! What have you designed?”
“Well, nothing, I need a job first.”
No. No, no, no. There is no reason to wait for a game job to start making games. I’d argue that if you aren’t compulsively making games already in some way then you may not want to consider this job in the first place. A great many professional game designers do game design in their spare time, as do many amateur prospective designers. Your in competition with both for jobs, so even the playing field and start building experience.
Yes, I’ve said this already in other parts of this series. That’s how important it is. Get to work designing games. Make a card game. Design a mod. Find a programmer and artist friend and get to work on an indie game. To make games you have to immerse yourself in them. Design is an art form that takes practice. It involves a lot of instinct and applied knowledge. Designing things builds those areas of your mind.
So, I’ll repeat, if you want to be a designer get to work and start designing something. It’s never been easier.
Are you really a designer?
I’ve met a lot of people who claim they want to be game designers that, when I question them, I don’t feel could do the job. The primary reason is they don’t understand the job. They either have no idea what game designers do, or have very wrong assumptions.
Hopefully you don’t assume that designers just play games all day, but I have to assume some number of people who read this have made that assumption. I can assure you, they don’t. They spend a fraction of their time playing games, and since their job is to refine the game into something that is fun, the time they do get to spend playing games isn’t, well, traditionally fun. Every game spends a significant portion of its development life in a state that is not fun to play. Maybe you’re waiting on technology for a feature to be fully functional, or art to allow you to visualize things, or you’ve got both of those things but it simply isn’t fun to play and you have to figure out why. Once it’s fun, well, you’re done and you move on to some other un-fun part of the game. I know some designers who enjoy this. I actually enjoy it. I also know people who can’t judge anything but a fully finished product, and in my experience that’s most people. Those people are unlikely to make good designers.
Designers have to work things out on paper, imagine how they should function even when the tech isn’t fully there. They have to be able to gauge how something will feel once it has audio, or visualize something that has no art. Myself and another designer did the first round of game balance and tuning on Dawn of War with almost no art. All the units were big squares and rectangles with names on top of them: Space Marine, Land Raider, Wave Serpent, etc. They had no FX. They just stopped moving and then would disappear after they’d been invisibly fighting for many seconds. We played game after game like this, hours on end, working to visualize how the game would feel once those boxes were animated models with sounds, then tune accordingly. The result was most units were fairly playable when they were implemented, which greatly sped up the development process on a game with a very tight timeline. In my experience people with the skills to do this are rare. If you are one of these people you’re very special, but if you’re not then design isn’t a great discipline to pursue.
Designers also can’t truly do their work without the work of others. Artists can make art, programmers can write code, but designers who aren’t multi-discipline rely on the work of others. As a result, being able to communicate well with a broad array of personality types is very important. Designers have to be good communicators, because they’re going to spend a lot of their time trying to comprehend the needs of others, as well as convincing others of their designs. I’ve never worked on any team, in any position, even as the lead of the team, where the team didn’t have to be convinced that the design direction was a good one, because the team members aren’t required to see what’s not there. That’s primarily a designer’s job.
The other popular way to misconstrue the work of designers is to assume that designers simply dictate what they want to the team, and the team does it. While there is an element of this to design work, it’s complicated enough that I could write another entire article on it. The important thing for this article: entry level design positions are not game visionaries. Unless you are making an indie game with a couple friends you aren’t going to go into a big company and start ordering people around. Even at the highest level persuasion is far more powerful than marching orders. Game developers are creatives, not soldiers.
My final recommendation in this area: you can find hundreds of free design talks from GDC and other conferences on Youtube. Many of these will give strong insight into what the job of a designer looks like. Do your research, and know the job you’re trying to get.
A degree is still valuable
As design is the least defined as a discipline in the games industry, there are few colleges offering degrees in that specific area. Of the ones that offer degrees, some are of limited use as the tools needed to make a good designer are by no means well defined.
But a degree holds lots of value regardless, for mostly the same reasons I’ve mentioned previously in this series. If you can’t find or don’t trust a design degree then I highly recommend the social sciences, writing, history, criminology, psychology, or a general liberal arts degree. Anything that teaches about human nature is going to be valuable, because design is heavily dictated by our basic instinctual preferences.
Find any way in
It is not uncommon for designers to have started their career in some other aspect of game development. The most frequent is QA, but production, HR, marketing, etc. are all avenues. Even other disciplines like programming or art can be a path if you have talent in those areas, but prefer design. In my experience design is one of the hardest positions to get, so sometimes finding an easier path and then migrating over is a better way.
This route has challenges, mostly in that you can get pigeon-holed in the job you’re doing. Make sure you’re developing relationships with designers if you manage to get a job within a company. Get to know them, and more importantly, get to know the nature of their job.
Be persistent
You are probably not going to get a job in the game industry.
Does that statement make you mad? Good. Hold on to that and prove me wrong.
Far more people want into the game industry than that industry can support. Simple math means you will find it extremely challenging at best. Have a long term plan for how to support yourself. Be creative. Be vigilant. Believe in yourself. Positive affirmations work, so do them. It may take you years to get your foot in the door, but the good news is that once your foot is in it’s much easier to keep that door jammed open.
Play everything, Practice game critique
I took a couple years off from game development to write a novel and one of the best things about that time period: I could play whatever I wanted. More importantly, I could choose not to play games if I wanted. As a designer you need to be well versed in games. You should play every notable title in your genre of focus, but you should probably play the best games from genres you never play. I don’t like racing games, but I’ve played a good amount of Forza because it’s chock full of good design choices.
In addition to this, make sure you’re playing games and looking at them as a designer, not a player. What I mean by that: players only think about their own preferences, but designers have to think of their entire potential audience. You can’t make a game for everyone, but you should understand exactly who you’re making your game for. If your answer is “people just like me” then you’re going to be limited as a designer. That’s not to say you can’t be successful designing for yourself, but you’re likely to be more successful if you understand a broader audience. Choices that don’t matter to you as a player may turn off thousands of prospective players.
In other words, it’s better to break the rules with foreknowledge than to do it because of ignorance. It’s the difference between good design and flailing.
My recommendation: play games like a game reviewer. Again, this doesn’t mean just state your opinion. It means thinking about all the different kinds of players and people who would play the game and put yourself in their shoes. Maybe you love game options, but have you considered how a dozen pages of dense game options may turn off some, or even bury highly important options beneath trivial ones. One approach isn’t better than another, unless you aren’t serving your desired audience, and you can’t know that without thinking about players who may not think like you.
This advice is more “how to be a designer” than “how to get a job”, but one does lead into the other.
Post your work
Don’t be afraid to post your work online. Get it out there and in front of people. Don’t be shy. Accept criticism as a way to get better. And don’t be precious with your ideas. Your ideas won’t get you a job nearly as well as your ability to implement ideas into a final product. The latter is the job of a designer. The former, well, ideas come from everywhere and a good designer hunts for the best ones instead of assuming they’ll come from themselves. At least, that’s my opinion.
Always be designing!
See how important I think this is? So important that I’ve obnoxiously mentioned it again!
Good luck!
So ends my series on getting a job in the gaming industry. If you have any questions, anything you feel I could clarify or didn’t address, please send them along and I’ll see if I can address them in a follow up.
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