questions from game designer wannabe

hi,
I want to be a game designer but not a programmer. When i look job openings, if it is a game design opening, that needs programming. If it is a game programming job, it needs programming. So i want to be game designer(someone who designs gameplay, experience), not a programmer. How can I pursue a job with this interest. And should i learn visual scripting language? Is the only way programming?
I tried a lot to learning c# and it doesn't come funny to me. And I really like to think about gameplay. I want to work as someone who decides character balancing, economy etc...
edit: additionally i started this year studying computer sciences but i see it probably wont be an entertaining 4 years.

 

That's called idea guy and the position is usually taken by shareholders, top executives, and all sorts of "managers" that don't know or understand what their people are doing.

Thinking and imagining good ideas is one of many tasks the designer has to do. The most important one is to design good and cheap ideas that can be done by someone that actually makes games. So you have to know how to talk with the programmer and for this, you need to understand programming.

 

Ideas are not worth anything it's implementing them that's worth something.

 

That's not true. Yes, there definitely are "idea guys" and they're not useful unless they also bring other skills or resources to the table. But genuine design skill is a valid and valuable thing to bring to the table.

Before I bring designers onto a team I want to see and play stuff they've designed. I want to know that they can be given a problem in terms of a desired player experience, and then use what's available to them in a particular project to solve for that desired experience. Most professional game designers won't be designing a whole game, by the way. They'll be designing a level or a system or something within the context of a larger game.

In any case, you're going to have to find some way to demonstrate that you've got genuine skill in the design department. Also, you might need to build that skill, because it's not just about having good ideas.

A few things to think about:
- Are there any games you can mod to show off your skill? Eg: make custom levels, custom campaigns, custom units, or something like that.
- In your local game dev community, are there teams or projects you can work with? This shows not only the output, but also teamwork, which is critical to a professional designer.
- Can you work with something like RPG Maker, or off-the-shelf game frameworks from the Asset Store or similar?

For each of the above, start with an intended experience (ie: write yourself a brief) and, when you're done, do a short writeup of how you iterated towards achieving that brief and stick it on your website or similar. Or make video blogs and explain it.

For what it's worth, a designer who can do some programming is far more flexible than one who can't, so working on that might make it easier to find a job. But there are design roles which don't require programming, too.

 

Agreed - because everybody's got the greatest ideas ever

 

There are people who work as game designers. Have you read books on game design? For example, here is one that is pretty good:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1138098779/

That book also has some short interviews of well known game designers, and those interviews mention how some of the game designers got started in the industry.

There are people on large projects who focus on game design specifically. A lot of companies look for highly skilled people who have already done a specific job at similar companies on other large projects. It may be tricky to get your first job in game design.

 

Thank you for very explaining answer. I think i will try modding for games like gta5/minecraft/other stuff.

In my country, there isn't even enough game programming jobs. Game design jobs almost doesn't exist. And that design jobs are very competitive. Can you advice me something for competing each other? (If your advices same as above, just don't consider to reply.) thank you so much for solution oriented answer.

 

Yes, it's a super competitive field. I certainly wouldn't rely on getting that specific job. Consider that getting a job often isn't just about skill, but also connections.

With that in mind I'd start working on connections ASAP. Do you have a local game dev community? Get involved and start getting to know people. And if people at studios you'd like to work at are available to talk to then see if you can do that, see what they're looking for specifically when filling new roles.

- - -

One thing I didn't think of before is that you could try board game or table top game design. The tools are different but the principles are very similar. Depending on what particular areas of game design interest you, you could also try stuff like writing (and running) campaigns for role playing games.

 

You need to program to be able to actually create the gameplay you are designing and prove the concept. If you think a designer just makes ideas and hands that off to someone to make then you are in for a shock. You are expected to know to a pretty intermediate level most of the disciplines if you are a game designer.

Explaining an idea or showing a pretty picture is not desinging, you need to have technical skills. You might not be expected to be an efficient programmer or have knowledge of computer science, but you need to be able to script and program, as well as dabble in art even if its just touching up existing assets or kitbashing.

BTW, very rarely does anyone go right into game design, you usually start as a programmer, artist, producer etc with some experience and at least one development cycle. If not then you will need to learn a ton of stuff first. But no one is going to hire a designer with no experience AND no technical skills.

So I recommend if you really want this, you need to suck it up and learn programming as soon as possible. If you are expecting to get a job within this field within next 5 years, I suggest you start immediately because it takes a very long time to get to a point where you are good enough to be hired.

Note: Everything above is only based on UK market, and assuming you are trying to get a job in an established game company that is not a massive AAA and also not a tiny indie. I have no idea about tiny indies, and for AAA massive companies like EA studios etc, there are such big teams that you could actually work purely on design without having to do anything else - but you would likely also have past experience and probably know some programming by that point anyway

 

I pinged two of my favorite designers for their thoughts, and weill post them here.

Based on experience, you need to be a complete kickass guru at spreadsheets for one. At LF our Sr Combat designer basically built the game in Excel and was able to simulate virtually any type of game play and balance the crap out of them game. Most designers come to laterally, from project management, story, analytics, BI, UX/UI and producers. It is a unique skill set, and more of a challenge to prove than most. (and artist can just show their profile). The ones I know came from other fields and put themselves out there get a design project/feature and did a great job at it. Starts them on the track. If you are coming on to an existing project, you are likely going to minor tasks (economy/resource balancing, etc) to show what you can do. (unless you have a track record that drops you in high).

 

I have never denied it, but I suppose reading the second part of my post was too hard.

Also, the best game designers are always coming from modding communities, especially modders of multiplayer games. Because besides thinking out ideas, developing and releasing them, modders also have to be active in communities, market their mods, and the most important part, they can see in real-time, how people are playing their mods. Based on that, the modder can easily find all the flaws and iterate on them.

That's called experience. Something that no book and no school will give you. Theory can help someone to perfect their knowledge, but It will never make you a good designer. I talked with a few designers working at Ubisoft, they had a real degree and 1-2 years of experience, and they were worse in finding all possible connections and potential problems of their design than some kid that has made few mods in Minecraft.

Because of the nature of the job, you also need to have a similar social skill to the manager, but that's usually not a problem. The main issue is finding someone with analytic mind.

 

So feedback from one of my friends (sr game designer, aaa console, mobile and everything in between).
Basically he said you need to demonstrate you know how to design a game. not just on paper. Board games, things like roblox, etc, unity and/or modding. being an engineer isn't important, but programming is, as it is the same logic. If you want to be a game designer, you need to make games. Figuring out how to do that is kinda your first task. Which makes sense.

 

No, I read your whole post and still felt it worth pointing out that saying a designer who can't program is "called idea guy" is wrong. Even if we agree that they usually grow into design from some other discipline, that discipline does not have to be programming. Of course it's going to depend heavily on what opportunities are available to you, though.

This thread isn't about labels, though, it's about getting a job. So, getting back to practical matters... Considering that it's a highly competitive field, there aren't enough jobs to go around, and everyone seems to think that some level of programming skill is helpful and/or important, if you ignore that then you're simply not giving yourself the best chance of success. I'd pick an engine and start chipping away at coding tutorials.

 

Heh... another comment he just made, I am going to just quote it rather than sum up. (game design is not my world) "Importantly, once they make something, sit down and watch someone play it. Learn that shame, feel it - that shame is what makes you a good designer"

 

I think the idea guy needs to atleast be a engineer so he understands a bit what is going on in the engine and and the domain also it can be good for working on game design. For example I'm working on ballistics right now, and having basic knowledge of math and physics do help

 

Care to provide more details on this? I can't think of a single instance with modern hardware where you would need an understanding of what's happening under the hood of a game engine to make your game.

 

Roblox, I totally forgot about that but it really is a viable option. I should suggest that to people more who want to learn game dev!

I suppose shaders sort of requires you to understand hardware < > engine interactions, like you need to know about the registers etc. And ECS requires you to understand what the engine is doing with storing and accessing memory. But yeah I agree other than those barely related points, I cant really think why you need to know the engine under the hood parts unless your joining a massive company with source code access.

Knowing what the engine is doing with the C# side (not c++, as far as I am concerned its in black box magic land at that point for a good reason) is useful though, I am sure most of us take a gander at unitys C# internals to work out what certain API calls do at points.

 

Under the hood as in vector math, shader programming etc.

 

There are very good answers here, i am very appreciate.
But there is some people that is very Smarty-Pants. When i read their writes, it seems very sh*ty. It doesn't help about anything and they say only idea guy.
I explained what i want. I study computer science i will eventually learn programming. But i don't want to be programmer (not sure about this one).
I know there are people that balancing characters/weapons in online games. These people aren't programmers. I wanted to decide what paths should game contains(gameplay).
There were very good answers, and others are coming. But just don't be smarty-pants. I don't want your advices if you are talking just sh*t and don't know anything.

 

That's not "under the hood".

"Under the hood" is manually loading 3d file formats, procedural geometry, decoding/encoding data from texture memory directly, and modifying source code.

Modern shading languages are fairly high level and do not require you to use registers. Actually below shaders, hardware is a blackbox, and you don't know how it works exactly, although you can pull performance numbers from it.

What's more, some engines abstract the high level language away and hide great deal of implementation details. For example, in traditional unity renderer you can pull up information on how forward lighting works EXACTLY from shader code, but in case of unreal, you don't know, as it is hidden, and you have limited functionality exposed to you. I believe unity is currently trying to do the same with shadergraph.

So you could perform an equivalent of kitbashing via shader graph and it would work without in-depth underlying knowledge.

 

I ment under the hood from a game designers perspective.

 

Strangely a buddy of mine started in games as a character animator. Currently is the sr./lead game designer on... well.. one of them big franchises. He is the only one I know with an specific art background. Yea, most know a variety of things.

In larger studios games/projects, there will be several designers under the lead with specific skills or at least focuses. For Commander, we (at peak) had about 6 designers. Lead, narrative, combat, economy and campaigns. Though they shifted around as needed.

 

Definitely not. Maybe on a solo game, but typically that stuff is no where in the responsibilities or needs of a game designer. Visuals will fall under the art director, but rarely do they even know shaders. Same with vector math or engine/math specific stuff. I have never designer who is an engineer (it would seem antithetical depending on skill level). Most know how to program, as it is logic. But there aren't really instances were a dedicated game designer is going to benefit from under the hood stuff like shaders and specific math.

 

Still
There is genuine bad ideas, believe me.

 

Yes, and some genuinely great ones. It was really just a cliché / meant humorously. From the developer's perspective, you're often getting paid to make other people's ideas come to life no matter where in the spectrum of greatness they are.. which is subjective anyway / mostly opinion. Even if something makes a billion dollars, that doesn't make it great to everyone, and just because something makes nothing at all doesn't make it bad. Plenty of apps/games/etc are great because they were a passion project of everyone involved. It had nothing to do with how much (or how little) anyone would make and "the bottom line" was that it would be enjoyable, not just the completed work of art but the process of creation itself.

In business the concern is for ROI and whether something's a worthwhile gamble. Scribbles and notes and (when you're lucky) storyboards, requirements doc, some psd mockups.. "good to go, right?" I don't think the majority of people outside of this field can truly relate to what it takes beyond that point. There seems to be this perpetual disconnect of perspective between those who actually code apps/games/websites/etc. and the people hiring them to. There's plenty of people tapping away and navigating websites that don't even know what coding is. And I'm talking about adults here that somehow despite using technology every day all day for decades still haven't got past the level of email, icons and updates. Well.. frankly it's a bit easier these days, pretty much down to a brief irritation of swiping away a notification that says "10 apps were updated."

Anyway, there have definitely been exceptions, where ideas were interesting and fun to develop, but it seems more often than not (in business), the only reason something in particular exists is because someone who thought of it can afford to have it built, or someone who can afford to have it built was convinced the investment was justified, ..and for that to be the case, it has to come off like a great idea, even when the actual sentiment going around is genuinely mediocre.

If you spend a lot of time thinking how you could have done things better when you look at stuff, how much you want to see these gameplay ideas become reality, you might have the personality for it - but you should definitely learn to do it for yourself (and since you're on the way to that with your schooling, congratulations). Firstly, because the real world is about compromise - unless you're exceptionally well-established, you will never find other people that will take your ideas as presented and make it happen without question. The only guarantee of seeing your ideas become reality is either doing things for yourself, hiring someone to do them or convincing someone else it's worth their time. Second, you should understand how things work "under the hood" so that when there's a problem with something, you will understand why, you will understand what can be done about it, or that nothing can be done about it and you will have to rethink the approach to make it realistically possible.

Every single person alive - no matter how much they can do now - there was a time they knew nothing. We've all started out as a noob, whatever the field of interest. And no matter how much you can eventually do, you will never know it all, there will always be more to learn. Focus on growing a skillset based on what you love to do, because if you're going to become good at something you should enjoy how you're going to be spending the majority of your time.

The struggle is what contrasts the reward of achievement. It's not a big deal to arrive at a destination after walking for a few minutes, but spend a few years getting there.. priceless. Just make sure you've enjoyed them, because if you're always waiting for something, you'll never arrive.

 

Okay, so you people think a game tester job can be a path for game design job?

 

game tester job can only help you make connections. your going to have to do things on the side to still prove you can design and develop games.

 

There is always the indie/modder track, where you design and create your own games/mods. If your work is good enough finding an experience developer to work with should be easy enough.

There are quite a few modders and indie devs/designer that have made it E.g. check out the developers who made Meat Boy, PUBG.

But being able to create your own designs would be a huge advantage even if they are only MVP prototypes.

MVP - Minimum Viable Products. Just enough to show off the games core features.

 

This used to be an anecdotally common pathway, but I'm not sure if that's the case any more. I'd say that's something to ask the specific studios you're looking at working with.