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What do you do?
When the designer comes up with the game idea,
they pass them on to a number of other people. For instance,
a script writer. The actual game play itself may be
passed to an assistant designer, and they will look
after the details of that part of the design. The lead
designer sits at the top of the tree and makes
sure that what everybody does fits in with his vision
of the game, so that when it’s all assembled into
it’s final package, the game makes sense and is
pleasant to play.
During the course of creating a game, we make what’s
called the design document. The design
document is a living document. That means the document
changes over time. It will start off with about three
or four pages, which is sent to a game publisher when
we are first signing up the game.
After it’s been signed off, the document will
be fleshed out to about 50 or 60 pages. Then we’ll
do another pass on it and check that everything makes
sense. The document will eventually grow to somewhere
between 200 to 1000 pages. What we are doing as lead
designers is just spending most of our days
writing documents, and just occasionally when we get
a chance, playing some games as well!
As the lead designer, we are the owner of the design
document. We stamp the final approval to the
changes that go into it. That document will go out to
another three or four script writers and designers and
come back over time. But we’re responsible for
making sure that everything in that design document
is correct and consistent.
Then it goes to our producers the lead programmer, the
lead artists and then down the tree.
How did you get to where you are today?
I’ve had an unusual path into the games industry.
I started off studying medicine and decided I hated
sick people. I played in a band, and quit that. I spent
a year surfing. Then I came back and ended up doing
a science degree, intending to be a mathematics teacher.
Somewhere along the way, I happened to write a game
and it happened to be a big seller. That was back in
the 1980s, at the start of the games industry.
I worked part time in the industry and then full-time
in the late 80s. That was back in the good old days
when it was quite feasible for one person to do all
of the work on the one game. You were the lead designer,
the programmer, the artist, and also the musician and
the sound engineer. You’d be doing basically everything.
As the industry grew during the 90s, as we added more
people into the projects - the programmers and the artists
- a lot of the people like myself found ourselves working
as the designer. So I kind of fell in to it.
It’s a great fun job, and it’s a job everyone
would like, but we don’t sit around all day playing
games, as much as we’d like to.
What skills are necessary for you
to do your job?
I look for is a person who has a very broad
experience in a number of areas. Coming from
a programming background is very helpful because as
a designer who creates games, the whole games creation
process is limited by what the programmers can do. So
if you understand current programming techniques
and programming limitations, you can
understand what can be done in a game.
A wide knowledge of games is obviously
helpful. No one is going to be a games designer unless
they have spent many hours playing games.
But I also look for a lot more than that. I’ve
found over the years that a person who does nothing
except play games all evening every evening, is limited
as to what they can design into a game to what they
have previously experienced in a game. So whilst that’s
a valid set of experience, that’s not the only
experience that we look for. I like to see people designing
games who play sport and who participate in a number
of areas completely outside and separate
to the gaming arena. It just gives them an extra set
of ideas they can draw from when fleshing out a games
design.
I’m a great people watcher.
It can be very instructive just watching people walk
down the street, to observe what people’s attitudes
are, what influences them, what they look at. Watching
people can actually be very instructive as to how to
design a game. Like watching how much fun a kid has
flying a kite, and then applying that to a game. I think
some Japanese designers in particular get this really
right. So a broad experience - broad
reading habits, broad game playing habits, and just
general broad living habits.
A designer straddles both the technical and the artistic
field. You have a finger in every pie that’s being
cooked in the project and it’s important to have
worked in the industry for a number of years.
It’s very rare for a person to come along and
immediately start working in the designer role. You
might come in as a level designer. As an entry level
designer, you would be following a set specification
to make up that level exactly to the designer’s
or system designer’s specs. There is room for
some creativity, but it’s not a fully creative
job. But a level designer can lead onto a lead level
design and system design, but you can’t get into
assistant design or lead design positions until you
know how the artists work on the project and how the
programmers work on the project and how everything fits
together.
It’s very important to put down about five
years experience in the industry before you
can move into the lead design role.
How important was your education/training?
We like to draw our candidates for entry level programming
and artists to have some sort of training.
But really we are more interested in how clever they
are and how good an artist they are, how good a programmer
they are.
For a programmer, having a degree from a reputable
institution or an institution shows us a person is capable
of learning and shows us what they can do.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t employ someone
who had no degree. The same with an artist. We are going
to look at their portfolio to see if they are doing
beautiful work. If we love it and it fits with that
project, then we’ll employ that person.
At the end of the day we’re looking at the quality
of work. I’ve worked with people who
have switched into this industry. I’ve worked
with a person who used to be a lawyer, and a designer
who used to be a geologist. In fact, another one of
our designers used to be a geologist so I’ve had
two geologists working as designers over the years.
Another one of our programmers used to be a maths teacher,
so we’ve had all sorts of people. So it’s
the quality of the person and the quality of their work
that’s important to us.
Where do you see your career going?
In my case, I started my own company. I worked for
a number of years with a Sydney company and worked as
a lead designer and managing the Melbourne office and
we parted ways about three or four years ago. Then I
started my own company down in Melbourne. Once you are
running your own company there is no where else to go
except get the company bigger and bigger, or broker
and broker – either one generally happens. But
we’re still here and growing slowly, or though
it’s a very fickle industry.
I would recommend to anyone getting into the industry
that you have something to fall back on.
It’s an industry that burns people out. After
three or four years, we’ve got people who never
want to see or play a game again. One of the things
for a programmer is that it is good to have a formal
education and a good degree because you can then move
on and in to corporate IT if you don’t happen
to like it.
What advice would you give to someone
wanting to enter the games industry?
There is about four paths into the industry: programming,
art, level design, and QA which is quality assurance
– the games testers. In Australia getting a job
as a games tester is notoriously difficult. We don’t
have a lot of large testing departments or studios.
A lot of our testing is sent off-shore to American publishers.
So whilst there are some jobs as testers, they are very
hotly contested. You need to have quite good qualifications
to get into them and it’s a tough ask to get in
through that door.
The second area to get into the games industry is programming
-- probably the most common way for a lot of people.
Games companies are always looking for quality programmers
who have done a good degree at a university or a particular
place with a games focus. The progression through from
programmer to lead programmer in to the design field
for someone interested in design is fairly common. That’s
probably the most common path for some to be a designer.
Art is the other big way into the industry, but you
seriously have to be a good artist. It’s very
difficult to get a job with just a multimedia degree
from a smaller institution. We see 20 to 30 resumes
a week from people with that exact same degree, and
unless they are very skilled, a lot just get a reply
back saying “sorry”.
The final way to get into games in Australia is through
level design. It’s really an arts based skill,
or its sort of where art meets programming. There will
be some scripting involved, sort of what you’d
do with ‘mod’ development with a first person
shooter like Quake.
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