Anatomy of a Game Designer

Many of the people working in game development aspire to be game designers. It's a highly sought-after position, and for good reason. Of all the jobs on the development team, game design is the one that offers the greatest scope for creative expression. In most cases, it is also the designer who gets the credit for a successful game and who gets the media attention. And if the designer's name becomes well enough known, fame can lead to fortune . Sid Meier, the designer of Civilization and many other titles, is now so famous that his name alone can increase the sales of a game. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (Firaxis Software) was actually designed by an ex-employee of Firaxis, Brian Reynolds, yet the publisher put Sid Meier's name in the title.

Like all crafts, game design requires both talent and skill. Talent is innate, but skill is learned. Skilled craftsmen know everything about the requirements of their job, the tools of their trade, the material with which they work, and the result they are trying to produce. For an effective game designer, a wide base of skills is required.

"One of the most difficult tasks people can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games ."

” C.G. Jung

Perhaps because the ideal skill set for an effective game designer is so extensive , diverse, and poorly defined, the requirements for the position of game designer are frequently underestimated. Many development groups treat game design as just one more task for a technical project lead, or as a communal process performed by the entire team. In practice, the skills required for effective game design are much more wide- ranging than you'll find in your average technical lead. This doesn't mean that a programmer can't become a game designer; it just means that you need far more than programming skills to be one.

The following sections discuss some of the skills that are most useful for the professional game designer. Don't be discouraged if you don't possess all of them. That does not mean that game design is not for you. It's a wish list ”the characteristics we would like to see in a hypothetical (but certainly nonexistent!) "perfect designer."

Imagination

A game exists in an artificial universe, a make-believe place governed by make-believe rules. Imagination is essential to creating this place. Fortunately, this is not a problem for most people. Even if you feel that your imagination isn't your strongest point, it's possible to develop and improve it. Of course, this isn't a new concept. It's been around for hundreds of years , as can be seen in the following extract:

"Thou shouldst regard various walls which are covered with all manner of spots, or stone of different composition. If thou hast any capacity for discovery, thou mayest behold there things which resemble various landscapes decked with mountains , rivers, cliffs , trees, large plains, hills and valley of many sort . Thou canst also behold all manner of battles , life-like positions of strange , unfamiliar figures, expressions of face, costumes, and numberless things which thou mayest put into good and perfect form .

Do not despise this opinion of mine when I counsel thee sometimes not to let it appear burdensome to thee to pause and look at the spots on walls, or the ashes in the fire, or the clouds, or mud, or other such places; thou wilt make very wonderful discoveries in them, if thou observest them rightly . For through confused and undefined things the mind is awakened to new discoveries. But take heed, first, that thou understandest how to shape well all the members of the things that thou wishest to represent, for instance, the limbs of living beings, as also the parts of a landscape, namely the stones, trees, and the like."

” Leonardo da Vinci , Treatise on Painting

The imagination is like a muscle; with regular exercise, it grows stronger and easier to flex. Imagination comes in various forms:

• Visual and auditory imagination enables you to think of new buildings , trees, animals, creatures , clothing, and people ”how they sound and their strange ways of speaking.

• Dramatic imagination is required for the development of good characters , plots, scenes, motivation, emotions, climaxes, and outcomes .

• Conceptual imagination is about relationships between ideas, their interactions and dependencies.

• Lateral thinking is the process of looking for alternative answers, taking an unexpected route to solve a problem.

A great example of a product that demonstrates all of these forms of imagination in abundance is Infogrames's Outcast .

Deduction isn't ordinarily thought of as imagination, but it can lead to new and unexpected ideas. Deduction is the process of reasoning from a creative decision you've made to its possible consequences. For example, if you design a preindustrial farming community with no beasts of burden , the size of the fields and the productivity of the agriculture must necessarily be limited. Horses and oxen can pull plows and carry loads much farther than humans can. The limited food supply, in turn , affects the population growth rate and so on. These details are arrived at by deduction.

Nor does imagination consist only of the ability to think of things that are completely new. It's also valuable to be able to look at an old idea and apply a new spin to it, to breathe new life into it with a fresh approach. Too many people in the game industry see something old and familiar and dismiss it. Instead they should think, "How can this be made better? How might this be more interesting?" J.K. Rowling does this brilliantly in her Harry Potter novels . They're full of imaginative twists on old ideas about witches and wizards. She still has witches flying on broomsticks, but she invented the sport of Quidditch, which is played while flying on them.

Technical Awareness

Technical awareness is a general understanding of how computer programs, particularly games, actually work. It isn't necessary to be a software engineer, but it is extremely valuable to have had a little experience programming, even if only in Blitz Basic (www.blitzbasic.com) or some other simple language. A computer game designer's delivery medium is the computer, so it behooves you to know how computers do what they do and also to have a general idea of what they're not good at doing. A designer with entirely unrealistic expectations of what a computer can do isn't going to get very far. For example, computers do not understand English well. If your game design requires that the machine be able to interpret complex sentences typed on the keyboard, your programmers are likely to throw things at you.

You must also have a basic knowledge of the technical capabilities of your target platform. At a minimum, you need to know whether you're designing a product for a home console, desktop computer, handheld platform, or more than one of these. Every feature that you specify must be possible on the machine that you're designing for. If in doubt, ask the programmers. Knowing the limitations imposed by the selected platform will result in an achievable design.

Analytical Competence

No game design is perfect from the start. Game design is a process of iterative refinement, which progresses from a rough draft to the finished meisterwerk . Consequently, you must be able to recognize the good and bad parts of a design for what they are. This requires a keen logical and analytical mind, and the ability to manipulate nebulous concepts with a high level of mental agility and critical analysis.

It is very difficult to effectively criticize your own work. You can be excessively hard on yourself and become convinced that all your work is worthless, or you can be blinded by familiarity and unable to analyze your own work in an unbiased fashion. Inexperienced designers often err in both directions, swinging wildly from one to the other.

There is no easy solution to these problems. Good self-analysis skills come with practice. As a reality check, you can try peer reviews (which are always a good idea anyway). See what your colleagues and co-workers think of your design. Try to choose people who are likely to give you an unbiased opinion. Friends and family are usually not good choices. They will be either too easy on you ”after all, they are close to you personally ”or too hard on you because they don't want to be seen as biased and, consequently, overcompensate.

A specific example of when analytical skills are particularly useful is in detecting dominant (that is, unbeatable or nearly unbeatable) strategies at the design phase and weeding them out before they get into the code, as in the infamous Red Alert "tank rush." The tank effectiveness in Red Alert was so out of balance that an experienced player could dedicate all production to cranking out a few tanks and then immediately storm the opposition base before the enemy had a chance to get a production line set up.

Mathematical Competence

Designers must have basic math skills (particularly statistical math skills) because balancing a game is largely a matter of math and can be a difficult task. In the case of a real-time strategy game or a war game, the apparently simple problem of ensuring that there are no dominant strategies or fighting units to unbalance the game is actually quite math- intensive .

That's not to say that you need a Ph.D. in mathematics ”you're not going to be deriving complex equations from scratch. The only thing you'll need above basic math is some knowledge of statistical methods . Even so, in some cases, the math can be handled computationally . It's entirely possible that you can handle the math requirement simply by being good with a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel.

Aesthetic Competence

Although you need not be an artist, you should have a general aesthetic competence and some sense of style. Far too many games are visual clones of one another, depending on stereotypes and clich s rather than real imagination. It's up to you (along with your lead artist) to set the visual tone of the game and to create a consistent, harmonious look.

Suppose you're designing a clever and calculating female assassin with nerves of steel . Many designers would clothe her in skin-tight black leather and give her a big, shiny automatic pistol ; in other words, they'd opt for the stereotype, the easy way out. A slightly more imaginative designer might give her a miniskirt and a crossbow ”still male-fantasy material, but marginally more interesting. A really good designer would realize that an assassin needs to blend in to her surroundings, to look like anybody else, yet still be visually identifiable to the player. He would think about her personality and create a unique visual style for her that is distinctive yet unobtrusive . Lara Croft is a good example of this kind of thing. Despite her ludicrous proportions , she's dressed appropriately but quite identifiably for her role as an explorer: shorts, tank top, hiking boots. More important, her shirt is a particular color that nobody else in the Tomb Raider games wears, which makes her stand out on the screen. If you're seeing that color, you're seeing Lara.

We encourage you to expand your aesthetic horizons as much as you can. Learn a little about the fundamentals of art: the principles of composition, and which colors coordinate and which clash . Check out classic art books and visit art museums. Find out about famous art movements ”Art Nouveau, Surrealism, Impressionism ”and how they changed the way we see things. Watch movies that are famous for their visual style, such as Metropolis . Then move on to the more practical arts: architecture, interior decoration, industrial design. All these things can contribute to the look of your game. The more aesthetic experience you have, the more likely you are to produce an artistically innovative product.

General Knowledge

Some of the best game designers tend to be ex-programmers or people with at least some formal scientific training ”as long as they have broadened their sphere of knowledge outside of their narrow field of specialist expertise. A base level of general knowledge is valuable for a game designer, as is the ability to research what you might not know. It helps to be well-versed in mathematics, logic, history, literature, art, science, and current affairs. The more source material a game designer can assimilate, the better the final game design will be.

Make sure you watch a lot of movies and documentaries (The History Channel and The Discovery Channel are excellent resources). Read books, too, both for direct research and background material. The encyclopedia is a good place to start for any given subject. The information it contains might be too general for any detailed design, but it will provide a launching point. From there, you can increase your knowledge of a particular area by investing in other, more specialized books. They don't have to be particularly advanced ”unless you're aiming for something such as a historically accurate simulation, you can often use books aimed at children to bone up on the background. After all, you don't want to risk alienating your audience. A game that is too true-to-life (and, hence, is likely to require specialist knowledge) will disappoint its players.

Let's take an example: Most people's idea of pirates comes from swashbuckling Errol Flynn movies, J.M. Barrie's (or even Disney's) Peter Pan , and the Muppets' Treasure Island .

If you're designing a game based on piracy on the high seas, then exact historical detail isn't going to be what they expect ”a game based on venereal disease, scurvy, maggot-infested food that has to be eaten in the dark so the crew can't see what they're eating , starvation , brutality, and the "consequences" of dark and lonely nights on a female-free boat won't make a particularly interesting (or even tasteful) game.

On the other hand, if you have a game design featuring colorful , eye-patch wearing , wooden-legged pirates, gold, running deck battles, the Black Spot, the Jolly Roger, and buried doubloons secreted away on remote desert islands, then you probably have the seed of an entertaining game. Though, of course, if you'd stuck to the historically accurate literature, you wouldn't use the Jolly Roger (pure mythology) or the Black Spot (invented by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island ).

Books aren't the only source of knowledge, of course. A game designer's first research stop is often the Internet, with its wealth of free information. It takes only a small amount of searching using a quality search engine, such as www.google.com, to unearth some useful information.

Writing Skills

The professional game designer must have good writing skills. This means being clear, concise , accurate, unambiguous, and, above all, readable. Apart from having to write several detailed documents for each design, you might be expected to produce the story narrative or dialogue ” especially if the budget won't stretch to a scriptwriter.

Writing comes in several forms, and we briefly discuss some of these here. (We go into more detail in Chapter 4, "Storytelling and Narrative," and the appendixes.)

• Technical writing is the process of documenting the design in preparation for development. All possible questions on the game have to be answered unambiguously and precisely. For example, if a farm with one peasant produces one unit of food per week, does a farm with five peasants produce five units, or do the additional peasants consume additional food? Is the peasants' own food factored in? What is the maximum number of peasants that can work on a given farm? If all the peasants are killed in a raid, what happens to the farm? If it is not immediately destroyed , can the empty buildings be reoccupied by new peasants? How do farms get built anyway? Where do peasants come from anyway? At what rate? Does the player have to manage the farming process, or do the peasants just get on with it? Can peasants fight? And so on and so on.

• Fiction writing (narrative) is useful for the manual, background material; character descriptions; introductory, transitional, and finale material; as well as other bodies of text, such as mission briefings.

• Dialogue writing (drama) is needed for audio voiceovers and cinematic material. Unfortunately, in most games the dialogue is even cornier than 1970s television shows, and the acting is as bad or worse . Try to avoid clich s, and use grammar and vocabulary that match each character's personality. If you have an ear for regional dialects, it can add real variety to your game, but, again, avoid stereotypes such as "dumb rednecks" or "brassy New Yorkers." The game Starcraft made excellent use of the subtle variety of southern American dialects, including proud aristocrats, gruff old generals, obnoxious bikers, and cheerful mechanics.

The greatest game design acumen in the world will be useless to you unless you can effectively communicate your ideas. As a designer, you will often need to evangelize your design at several different levels. In the professional setting, you will initially need to present your design to a publisher. Following that, you need to obtain buy-in from the team that will develop the game. This can be done in person or in writing, but the result is the same. You will need to be able to transmit your enthusiasm for the game as well as go into mind-boggling detail of its finer points to allow the development team to be able to create a game from your vision.

Drawing Skills

Some skill at basic drawing and sketching is highly valuable, although not absolutely required for a designer if you have a concept artist to work with. The saying "A picture is worth a thousand words" is never more true than when you are trying to impart a game idea. The vast majority of computer games rely heavily on visual content, and drawings are essential when pitching a product to a third party. Game-publishing executives will be interested in a hot concept, a hot market, or a hot license, but only pictures get them excited. The images are the hook on which the executives will hang everything else that they hear. Otherwise, you can talk about concepts forever and they won't remember a thing when you leave the room because they don't have a visual hook to hang it on. The images will remain in their memories long after they forget the details.

The Ability to Compromise

Probably the most important skill for a professional game designer is the ability to compromise on details and integrate a variety of opinions while preserving a consistent, holistic vision of the game. In an ideal world, we would be able to design whatever suited us and never have to worry about the demands of a publisher or the interests of the customers. Unfortunately, these external needs and interests do have to be considered , and, more often than not, the game designer is constrained by genre or license.

Different people on the development team and at the publishing company will have concerns about their own areas of expertise (programming, art, music, and so on), and their opinions will pull and push the design in different directions. As the designer, it's tempting to seek sole ownership of the vision, to argue that things must be exactly as you imagined them and to ignore other considerations. After all, there are plenty of other voices in your company advancing points of view about the other areas. But you must resist the temptation to do that, for two reasons:

• First, you must allow your team some ownership of the vision as well, or its members won't have any motivation or enthusiasm for the project. No one builds computer games solely for the money; we're all here so that we can contribute creatively.

• Second, a designer who gets a reputation as a visionary but who can't deliver a buildable, marketable game doesn't stay employed for long. It's your job to deliver an integrated design.

In many cases, you'll be given a brief that limits you to designing a genre clone or a heavily restricted licensed property. Being able to work within these limits to the satisfaction of the customer, whether your customer is the publisher, license holder, or end user , is essential. Unless you are one of the famous game designers who can guarantee success with your name alone, you are unlikely to be given a completely free rein. You may have designed the best text adventure game since Colossal Cave , but if the style of game is out of favor with the public, you're probably not going to get your game made ”let alone published.