Ivyboy will be 16 in August. He thinks he wants to be a game designer.
By game designer, he means someone who comes up with the story line and the characters and the adventures. He doesn’t want to necessarily program the games.
He’s a smart kid, in Honors English at school, and he writes some pretty good stories. He won an online contest for K’nex Mech Warriors, writing a final installment of a story and winning some K’nex Mech Warriors toys. He’s a member of the literary magazine club at school and his English teacher is helping him to expand his writing genre.
What is he in for? What does he need to study? What should he focus on? Is there a particular university he should set his sights on? He’s only two years away from graduation, so he needs to start heading in the right direction if this is what he wants to do.
There are several universities with ‘game design’ programs right now. Ohio University (and other schools in Ohio) just got one going.
It’s long hours and brutal pressure, I’ll tell you that now. There’s a hell of a lot of money involved in game production and if the game doesn’t produce then it’s easy for that to destroy even an established firm.
I’ll also tell you that being the guy who comes up with the overall concept and storyline isn’t something that happens right away. To make an analogy that’s ‘Director-level’ work. He’s going to HAVE to put in some time as a coder or artist or something, possibly years and years, before he gets that opportunity. No major firm will give that slot to someone right out of school.
Studying art might be alright, but from what I hear it’s increasingly rare for programmers to become designers. In fact, if anything, he’s on the right path right now. Writing stories, characters, and game systems (I’m an RPG writer/developer myself in the Pen n Paper field) is exactly what the job is about.
Studying coding and art won’t hurt, but it’s not absolutely required. QA is a big path to becoming a designer. People often start out by testing games for designers. Showin that you’re responsible, reliable, and specific in QA works fine. If my current job doesn’t work out I’m going to aim for that.
I actually just read an article in Game Informer (don’t know the issue, sorry, it was at my mom’s) about just this topic. That guy made it sound like it was an absolute nightmare to get into. His story involves years and years of interviews, rejection, and the like before someone gave him a chance. The one notable bit of advice I remember from the article was that someone told him to get Unreal Tournament and design some levels by themselves so they have something to show in a portfolio.
He also mentioned that being a tester is a good option, but kind of a double-edged sword as that industry tends to typecast people and some may think “once a tester always a tester”. I suggest you take a look out for that article, it was interesting.
If he needs to start out as a tester, what can he expect? I remember reading here somewhere that you’re dealing with a black and white version with a lot of missing pieces that crashes every 10 minutes.
Basically, software testing or QA (Quality Assurance) involves taking a piece of very raw software and putting it through the ropes. A senior QA engineer will help write test plans, write automated tests, and do actual hands-on testing. A junior QA person will run test plans that someone else wrote.
What does this mean in the real world? He’ll spend hours a day doing the same thing, over and over, looking for bugs. If, for example, the game crashes, he’ll be expected to do the same sequence of events until he can say “When you jump over this river, then grab the berries, then if you sit, then jump, the game crashes.”
It can be a very tedious job. However, it’s a very important job, and people who can do it well without going nuts are in high demand.
So far as I know, it’s true that quality assurance (or possibly level design) is a good path into game design, but being a writer for a games company is something quite different.
In my experience looking for schools for game design, they are very often just programming and 3D modelling/animation, which is not exactly what you’re after. Very occasionally there is a school I see that offers something along the lines of game design or level design, but even then (non-documenting) writing isn’t really part of it. So I’d agree with what smiling bandit said - he’s in a pretty appropriate place right now. Studying creative writing and cinema studies would probably be a goodish way to go in the future, and throwing in some maths, computer science, and drawing classes wouldn’t be a bad plan either.
I would recommend that he follows the advice mentioned earlier and learns Unreal Editor (UnrealEd). He can learn the basics of game design in creating playable maps.
For more fun, I would recommend some free programs from the Net to help in education. Wings 3D is a 3D modeling program that’s easy to learn, and models made csan be imported into Celestia, which is a 3D navigable model of space in our galaxy that can be programmed to “fly” the models (and make movies and pics.) Terragen lets you create 3D landscapes and renders detailed and realistic photo-quality renderings; it’s great for backgrounds and overall level maps. An editor like UnrealED, which comes with the game Unreal Tournament, ties it all together.
All of these applications have extensive online tutorials and forums like here at the SDMB- they are great for being supportive and answering questions, and it’s possible to get right into game design from these forums by volunteering for “mod” projects and level design. The developers even go there to find talent, although you have to do something noteworthy to be noticed.
I would suggest trying it out this way- it’s a great way to see what is involved in creating a game. If he is interested he’ll be able to find his strengths and abilities, and develop them further. It has the added benefit of some great gameplay as well!
I can back this up. Lady Chance is Director of Testing and QA for a software firm. It’s lucrative enough that I’m in the middle of taking many months off and we’re getting by fine.
I’ll agree to the statement thast some ‘Game Design’ courses are basically just programming with computer art added. A good game design major/course will emphasize actual design, i.e. coming up with a concept and seeing it through. I know that the school I went to (RPI) recently added a gaming minor that is just that. I took the course that ‘inspired’ the minor, Intro. to Cognition and Gaming, and it was a very good class, and I had no interest in game design. The course actually started out with mancala. Yes, mancala, because how can someone design a computer game, full of complexities, rich plot, where every detail must be perfect, if they cannot understand one of the oldest, yet still complex and played, games out there? From there we went to things like checkers, chess, and so forth. We had sections on psychology of gaming, and logic problems (we had a couple lectures on the prisoners dilemma and had to write a paper on it.) We made logic charts, studied old video games for what made them good or bad, and the final project was to come up with a game concept.
A couple yerars later, and it’s a full-fledged minor. There are a couple classes where the goal is to design and make an actual game (usualyl just a 2-D sidescroller,) and others that teach about the busniess of gaming. It is a well-designed minor, and seems to actually prepare soemone for the field.
So, what I’m saying here, is that make sure to research the school and program offered if your son wants to get into design. Even though he says he doesn’t want to program, odds are, he’ll at least have to take programming classes, and possibly compuiter art classes (of the four guys I know who took the major, three were com sci majors, one was a computer art major.)
There is a print-magazine in the US on the computer game industry, GameDev, that has a companion website. It is a magazine for the computer-game industry, and it has one article named “Postmortem”, where project managers for completed projects say what went right and what went wrong. Mostly these stories paint a bleak picture of heavy employee turnover due to very long hours and low pay, and they don’t need “stories”, only people who can do well at debugging code very quickly. Sometimes none of the people who began a project are still on it at the end.
And last I heard, Electronic Arts was pounding the rest of the industry Wal-Mart style, by releasing more titles through the universally-popular method of working their employees longer hours for less pay.
One way of getting on is by working QA, but another more-recent one is by making many cool game mods and releasing them online. Relocating might be another concern: last time I heard, there were a few game companies located in Austin TX.
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Just one comment, but game design has largely degraded to “design by committee.” The EA model is that you either make non-horrible games with a tie-in or a new reincarnation of a generic game with more buttons. This gives them a farly guaranteed audience, and the impact of the committee-style is that even if you’ll never make anything impressive, nothing will ever suck all that much.
It’s a good business model and most are copying it in the US at least. If that doesn’t sound very encouraging, then your son might want to get thinking of ways to make himself into a game designer himself instead of working his way up to being one through standard channels.
This really depends. Does Mrs. Chance work for a game company or a standard IT-type company? If it is the latter, then yes, generally the pay is very good (I work for an IT company as a developer).
However, testers for gaming companies, so I hear, or bottom-of-the-barrel type jobs where the pay is poor and the testers rarely get noticed to ‘move up the ladder’. Of course, this is based on what I hear about EA, so your mileage may vary.
To the OP, I would recommend reposting your question at www.quartertothree.com. While it is mainly a gaming site, there is a larger-than-normal number of developers, programmers, and gaming journalists who might offer better insight than I surely could.
I know a couple of people in the game industry here is Seattle.
One of the guys is going to DigiPen which is an acredited “game” university that opened a couple of years back in Redmond, WA. It’s pretty heavily sponsored by Nintendo but it seems to have a pretty good program. There are some English Lit/Economics type classes to meet WA state accredidation requirements, but everything else is geared towards hard-core gaming. For example, the science requirements are all alot of physics, the art requirements are heavily geared towards game type art. So, instead of taking Art History 101 and Intro to Biology, you are taking all game related classes. On top of that, there are all the specific CS and design courses. The guy I know said there is basically 2 tracks through the school: programmer and artist. The first year you stay within your own group and do your typical freshman year intro type stuff. The second year he said you start doing small projects with the other group. But then he said the third and fourth year you are working in large groups with programmers and designers and following Nintendo’s design methodology to build a game over the course of the year. He said the senior year it even gets to the point that a group of developers is given a fake budget and they have to deliver a game. So, then the have to “hire” artists and designers from the other classes, design and script everything, do the programming themselves, or can “hire” other programmers from the school, etc. And at the end they are graded on the end product from concept to execution to playability, etc. Your son might want to check DigiPen. As an aside, I guess the drop-out rate at DigiPen is extremely high, so it’s got to be pretty tough.
My other buddy works at Valve (which puts out Half Life) and to hear stories from the inside there it sounds like a very high-pressure, hard-to-break-into world. They are an example of an small, independent game production house that basically has one super-huge flag-ship product (along with other smaller products) that they release new versions of every couple of years or so. I can’t imagine the pressure to work for 3-plus years on a game and then hope the sales projections pan-out for you.
As for what he can expect: he can expect to spend a lot of time at work. Hopefully, things will have improved by the time he graduates, but for now, it’s a pretty exploitative business. So he can expect a lot of 12-14 hour days, working weekends, and spending a lot of time thinking, “Why am I spending all day every day inside making sure a little cartoon duck moves around the screen correctly, when I could be helping find the cure for cancer or something?”
On the other hand, it also means he can expect to see a game in a store or read a review of it or hear people who were fans of it and think, “Yeah, that was pretty good, and I helped make it good.”
So my somewhat cynical and highly opinionated advice: (with the caveat that I am a game designer in title, but it’s one of those design-by-committee roles mentioned earlier in the thread, and it took me 10 years to get that far)
Dispel any notion that you just play games all the time. It should be obvious, but I still hear people say that and I still hear it used in commercials all the time. (“Can you believe we get paid to play games all day?”) It’s a lot more likely that you’re in the situation where you get a copy of every game as soon as it comes out, and never have time to play them. And the one(s) you work on, you never ever want to play again, no matter how good it is.
Don’t major in game design. If it’s available at whatever university he picks, take a few classes in it, or even minor in it if possible. But do everything to get as broad an education as possible. If anything, a major in game design has a little bit of a stigma attached to it – it implies that games are all you know and all you’re good at. There’ll be plenty of time for specialization and pigeon-holing you over the course of a job in games; don’t already start limiting yourself while you’re still in school.
Depending on the company “game designer” is either the movie equivalent of “director,” or the software equivalent of “technical writer.” Just like in Hollywood where everybody’s got a screenplay or a great idea for a movie, everybody in the games business has this brilliant idea that’s better than 99% of the games out there now. You’ve got to bring other skills to game development before you can get into a position where anyone particularly cares about your brilliant idea.
QA is a great start into the business. Somebody else mentioned that it’s easy to be “once a QA guy, always a QA guy” but I’ve seen dozens of counter-examples. (For instance, the guy who’s going to be replacing me as designer on my current project is coming directly out of the QA department). QA doesn’t generally pay well, and they get stuck with long hours and no respect, but it’s still a good way to get your foot in the door and meet people.
There are generally five tracks in game development. Pick one (or two) and take courses to support that: programmer (take CS classes), and artist or animator (visual art, computer art) are the ones that I’ve seen that require a related degree. The others you generally see people from all kinds of different backgrounds go into, but there are related fields that are useful – producer (business classes are helpful), level designer (architecture or visual arts), and audio (very, very specialized, typically music majors, and almost never go into design afterwards).
It’s probably best for anyone wanting to be a game designer, to take business classes. I know I wish I had; it seems boring when you just want to get into the “art” of making a game, but it’s essential to realize that there’s a huge business and marketing aspect to everything.
Check out as many different types of games as possible, and don’t assume that you don’t like a certain genre. A good game is a good game; you can look at the way games work and see aspects of all different genres in there – simulators can have aspects of the Tony Hawk series, first-person shooters can have aspects of point-and-click adventures, etc.
Read Will Wright’s lectures or presentations or interviews, wherever you can find them. Even if you don’t like Sims games or SimCity; the guy just gets what makes games work, and he can explain it better than anyone I’ve seen.