No 'I wanna be a game designer board'

Not that I want to, but I've been asked... anyone got any recommendations for uni courses, work experience for an aspiring young game designer with artistic leanings?

 

I'm a bored game designer. Does that help?

 

The most important thing is to have tons of awesome ideas, and to be able to tell the developers where to tighten the graphics.

 

Better yet walk up at an event and ask me how much I'll pay for your awesome idea and for you to come on board as executive producer.

Bonus points if your awesome idea is handwritten on a block of notepaper with poorly drawn 'concept sketches' in the margin.

The only other approach guaranteed to work is to send me an incoherent email telling me how much my game and everyone who worked on it sucks and then heroically offering your services to come in and fix it for us at a high concept level.

 

Amateur move. The pros can't tell you their awesome idea until you've hired them.

 

You don't need anything but a job, ask for associate testing job or coffee maker / office errand boy job or consulting job. Then you are set for future!


Most game designers start their career by making friends with the top brass. Then the usual career progress continues by agreeing on any stupid suggestion made by producers/director/marketing deparment. This will give you a reputation of someone who is "easy and nice to work with", and they will appoint you as the shining new game designer!

Avoid any great or original ideas, or the marketing drones will fight you at every possible turn, because you are making their job difficult by making something new.

Then, it is important to make sure that no one will blame you when shit rains down (=game sucks). Ask for bigger budget next time, or suggest that everyone who was against you should be fired because it was their fault for promoting "bad team spirit". Rinse and repeat.

SERIOUSLY though; I don't like this either, but this is how it usually works. I really do recommend plumbing rather than game design though. Plumbers got unions, and quality of their work is easy to evaluate. You will also learn the true roots of Mario.

 

Don't forget to take your mushrooms as well

 

Make as many games as you can in your spare time and constantly practice, use third party engines to make prototypes (Unity, UDK).

If you're writing skills aren't up to much then work on them. Get a job in QA if you can, once you've done that for a few years somebody may at least consider you for a junior design position.

Learn the fundamentals of programming.
Learn the fundamentals of 3D modelling/texturing.
Learn the fundamentals of 2D package like Photoshop.

Actually make something in which you will have to make meaningful design decisions.

Prepare for a life of everybody thinking they could do your job.

FYI, my career path:

• Uni (at which I learnt the above fundamentals).
• QA at a large developer (at which I continued improving my skillset).
• Interview with large developer for a junior design position based on my skillset.

I've seen plenty of designers without all of these fundamentals but they're incredibly useful on a daily basis.

 

I don't think external QA teams ever really get the opportunity to get noticed by dev teams. I got my start as QA too (but yeeeears ago), one of the guys I'm working with now also just moved from QA to a junior LD position after going through a mentorship program. Being embedded QA is a perfect place to shine and there are the right people around to learn from.

The rest of your advice is solid.

As for uni - I'm sure some of the courses must be good but I'm yet to meet a graduate with an English Game Design degree that learned anything useful on their course. Guys coming out of the Games Academy here in Germany have really impressed me though - I'd recommend their courses to anyone, not sure if there's an English equivalent.

 

Well getting QA experience anywhere is going to help your application to a studio for a junior designer position. Devs are more likely to take a chance on you if you have at least some experience in the industry.

Not only is QA valuable experience it also shows you're willing to pursue your goals even if you have to start at the bottom.

 

Teesside or Abertay. But the degree is a piece of paper, nice as a bonus to get picked up, or if you want to move into teaching games, which has academic requirements higher than the industry itself, (ironically); from a reputable place it can be worth something.

Portfolio + talent/enthusiasm > all, of course. It's only one initial part of design to have good ideas ofc; translating them into solid games and mechanics, and also being able to communicate these developed ideas well, is the bit that matters, (and is often overlooked by people who want to start out in games design).
Important point: plot/story doesn't = design.

As ha sbeen said, learn the fundamentals of a 3d package, a 2d package, and some coding/scripting. This knowledge will inform your design decisions, and help you appreciate the production sid emore, (especially the time scales to do what you may think are even simple things).

If you have an idea for a cool game mechanic(s), knock out little design documents and concepts, and follow through on them if it seems to work. Make a little flash app, or web based game. The plot and thematics will come quite naturally, once you start pinning down mechanics and systems.

Get familair with game engine tools, Unity, UDK etc, (CryEngine 3 is freely available including scripts soon too); make some demo's of levels, or a scripted event.
Some places like to see game ideas that are outsideside of video games: pen and paper stuff and so on. Again, the mechanics, and underlying workings of the game are as important as plot and narrative.

Importantly, it's great to see the reasoning behind design decisions in work that you demonstrate. Don't just show finished products, or apps etc. if you went through a good iterative process of developing something, include summisations of that, and be able to justify choices you mad ein your work.
This is more crucial in design than in any other department, so showing good decision making, and your thought process, will be a major boon.

Hope this helps.

 

Get an Internal QA job if at all possible, as in somewhere where you have direct access to the dev team, then use that. Not in an "anything you can do I can do better" sort of way, but just offer up your services for "dev QA" style odd jobs. Direct debugging in Visual studio, maintaining the umpteen million spreadsheets we have kicking about, basically anything that will make the devs realise that you're there and that you're useful.

If you do want to go to uni, I'd avoid any game related courses that aren't skillset accredited (which limits you to Abertay, De Montfort and I think one other place in the UK) as they aren't really taken seriously. You'd be better off with a generic CompSci or design degree that can you can use to prove your chops without narrowing your creative view.

 

Most of the junior design roles require an artistic eye. So if you haven't got that...then your writing and communication skills better be awesome.

QA...unsure about that route. I've seen people go from qa to asst producers, as they demonstrated detailed focus on trc's, know excel, word, etc. Don't know anybody who recently went from qa to design, but thats me.

Uni's? Abertay and teeside have excellent reps. Braben writes a lot about courses that are on to it. Theres also stock graphic, vis comms, or architecture courses out there all good design fundamentals.

My 2 cents.

 

Some good learning info here, tho mostly catering to level designers...
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryGameDesign

 

This might not be helpful for someone on the artistic side of the tracks, for what it's worth though, I got a Msc in CompSci so had a fairly strong programming kind of background, and this was very helpful for design jobs - the jobs i've gone for have jumped at this as it's a proven education to do scripting/UI programming and i think also some kind of ability to write fairly readable docs. I'm not sure how well regarded the current game design qualifications are, but to be honest in my career i've never met anyone who did one - i don't know what this says about their quality really, i can only really comment on what i've found.A lot of people do still come up via QA, and common factors are hard work and ambition and also i think a methodical approach to your work and good language and communication skills - having 'great ideas' wont cut it on its own.Even if you don't do a formal qualification, then it's still easy to learn some programming or scripting and use it to knock up a little game - i think what employers really want to see is a practical approach to making ideas work - loads of people love games and have lots of ideas, but a good designer is someone who can actually apply this within the constraints of time/engine/art team etc, and this generally does require some technical ability, at least enough to make you able to work effectively with the other disciplines within the dev team.

 

*wall of text crits your face for 2837398732*
*you die*

...shame your Msc didn't have any 'how to communicate to other people' modules.

 

A little harsh, given that you know fine well that the preview / post editing on the board eats newlines for most browsers.

 

Harsh but true. Preview post, post, check post, edit post and insert carriage returns if you fucked it. Or maybe I'm just anal [waits for jokes about bumsex].

 

I think you must get complete knowledge of php and java.