Ask a Game Dev

Hello! I would be happy to answer your questions.

What type of education or training is required to become a video game designer?

While some universities now offer game design as a major, there is no hard and fast education or training requirement for being a game designer. The core requirement for being a game designer is the ability to think about what kind of game content and features would be interesting to the game's target audience. This means that studies in a lot of creative fields can help with a game designer's skills - creative writing, film and stage production, filmmaking and cinematography, interior design, and similar fields are all very useful. That said, other fields are also good for breadth of knowledge as well - history, philosophy, technology, art, etc. provide a lot of additional context for creating believable and interesting game content.

Are there any expectations in the industry that are different than reality?

Absolutely. Regular people seem to think that being a game designer means that I play games all day long. Gamers seem to think that I just do whatever I want. In reality, we have pretty clear-cut goals. We need to do what we think is best for the game overall, and that means we always make decisions with the game’s future in mind, even if it means disappointing some of the players in the present. That means nerfing things players don’t want to be nerfed. That means choosing which bugs to fix because some are higher priority than others. That means not doing things we wish we could because of legal reasons that we are not allowed to talk about. That means creating content for microtransactions to earn money so that we can pay our developers to continue to develop new game content.

Qualities that would make someone more successful in the industry?

The most valuable quality I can think of is the ability to see from someone else’s perspective. A lot of designer hopefuls I’ve talked to have wanted to work on one game in specific that they love and ignore the broad variety of games out there. I’ve worked in games for a long time and I have worked on a lot of different kinds of games, some of which were not the kind of games I like to play. In order to do good work as a game designer, I still need to be able to create fun and interesting game content for the players of the game - even if I am not a fan of that kind of game. The ability to understand what the players of a particular game find fun and why is incredibly valuable.

Any recommendations to help me prepare for this career in the future?

If you want to do game design as a career, you should try making games yourself in your spare time. Run a tabletop RPG campaign. Participate in a game jam. Create your own cards for a card game. Create your own rules for a card game. Create your own rules for a chess or checkers game. Make mods for a game with mod tools like Skyrim or Roblox. Make your own levels in Mario Maker. Whenever you do this, ask yourself whether the rules make the game more fun. Consider how the new rules change the game and how they make the player feel. 

I hope these answers help. Cheers!

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

I first need to translate your question into something I feel is a little more accurate, because [you’re doing that thing where you assume that you’re speaking for far more people than you are] in order to make it seem more credible. So here goes:

Cool? Cool. Now, the obvious answer to this is “because the Q&A session isn’t 100% targeted at you”. [You are a hard core, entrenched fan]. You have to realize that the far-more-casual player that only plays the game maybe a few times a week and doesn’t consume all of the content doesn’t see as many of the problems that you do and doesn’t actually care to hear about them. What many of them do care about is information about upcoming stuff and new features. And there are a lot of them. You might not consider them “true” fans, but they usually outnumber you by between four and twenty to one. We devs care about them too. 

Q&A sessions are a golden opportunity for us devs to talk about things that you won’t get through the marketing campaign. Most of the marketing information has already been mapped out far in advance - reveal this on this date, reveal that on that date, reveal X at Tokyo Game Show, reveal Y at Gamescom, reveal Z at E3, and so on. [We can’t talk about that stuff at the Q&A because we are saving them for those other events that are coming down the line where we can put out enough context with it]. Anything that’s embargoed gets PR speak because we generally like our jobs and are not about to risk them because you really want to know something a few weeks early.

The best thing you can get from Q&A sessions really isn’t that stuff. A dev Q&A session gives you a golden opportunity to get actual dev stories about the development process and what the individuals in question wanted for the game or feature in question. If you want to see somebody passionate about game development, ask them questions about what they worked on, what they liked about it, and what sort of challenges they had to overcome. Ask a PVP designer about what sort of problems they had building this new warzone, or about unexpected behavior that popped out from test. Ask about things that the designers tried that failed, how they found out, and how they fixed them. The majority of the time that kind of stuff is not embargoed by marketing so the devs can speak freely about it. I know that I find it absolutely fascinating and I think many of you will too.

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Permadeath

Why yes, we would totally love to put in a feature that generates a tremendous number of customer service calls.

Support ALL of the options

[Decision Paralysis and Naive Diversification is a thing].

Save Game Import

[A lot of effort for a very small percentage of the players].

Just include it in the game for free

[Budgets are a real thing].

Player to player Item trading

[I just talked about this].

Make ______ into an MMO!

[Too expensive].

Just take the budget for multiplayer and add it to single player!

[Budgets are still a thing].

Delay the game until it’s ready

[We can’t stop technology]. [Budgets are still still a thing].

Branching Story!

[Because we only have so much concrete to pour].

Just add for the PC players

This can work for some small features (usually relating to graphic systems in nature), but players are notoriously bad at identifying what the scope of feature requests are.

Add a toggle

Opening a can of worms. It’s a pain to test, and... well, you may have heard the expression “if you give a mouse a cookie, it’ll want a glass of milk”.

That other game has _______, why can’t you add it too?

Because you don’t know what the other team had to cut in order to have ________.

Stop shipping with Day 1 patches

[The ability to patch stuff has actually helped our ability to deliver more and better quality content].

Classic servers! Support two different versions of the game!

[Maintaining different versions of the same game is really really hard].

Give us mod support!

[Mod tools for developers is easy. Mod tools for the public is hard].

Ok, here are the questions and answers this person asked.

1. What factors most effect the visuals of games? (new technological advancements, social expectations,cultural input, current/past events,films, budget etc) 

The #1 factor is the art director for the team. The art director sets the vision for the visuals of the game, and that informs everything. Things like technology, social expectations, etc. are all taken into consideration and constraints (along with things like the target ESRB rating, the target audience, and so on), but it ultimately falls to the team leadership to decide what the aesthetic of the game will look like. Some art directors push for the more realistic type, while others prefer a more stylized approach. Some are huge fans of cinema and cinematic techniques, and others are much more utilitarian in approach. It really depends on the decisions of the art director (and executive producer).

2. Which countries are your biggest buyers and do they effect the visual art within your games you produce? 

North America consume a lot of video games and is generally our primary market due to proximity and ease of entry. Asia is quite varied - Japan buys a lot of games too, but they are more constrained culturally than the Americans are so they are more reticent to buy certain kinds of games (or any Microsoft console). China is an absolutely enormous gaming market, but they primarily play PC and mobile games instead of game consoles. Europe is collectively the third largest traditional market, but that’s amortized across many multiple countries.

The art style can be informed by the nation we’re releasing in. Sometimes we need to localize based on specific cultural cues, or we’re constrained by local laws affecting what we are allowed to display. One of the largest emerging markets in the world is China, and their government is very strict about what can and cannot be shown in a game (e.g. no exposed bones, corpses only in certain conditions, etc.). However, that’s just requirements that we usually make and adjust after the fact, rather than affecting the vision that is used from the beginning to inform the game’s visuals.

3.How do you find the visual depiction of women in games, do you find them to be too orientated toward the male market? and do you find them to be overly sexualised? 

Games are widely varied in terms of media and depictions. While oversexualization has been a persistent problem in general (to the detriment of many otherwise-fine games), things are improving. You can always find problem examples in games without much trouble, but it’s becoming easier and easier to find alternative games that just aren’t as sexualized. The progress might not be coming as fast as some would like, but it is definitely noticeable. The publishers have certainly noticed it - diversity in representation and less pandering have actually translated to more money being earned, so you should expect the general trend to continue. However, there will always be a market for the sexy, so smart money would bet on there always being at least some developers who will develop for that audience.

4.Will the revisit of retro, pixel style games last or fade?

The pixel aesthetic won’t really go away as long as there are people who will pay for games with that visual style. I don’t expect it to be the primary style for any AAA games, but it’s very popular among indie devs and very conducive to getting started.