The myth about gamedesign

If you ask 100 gamers about gamedevelopment and what position they would like to have if they would work in gamedevelopment, 99 of them will say:”Gamedesigner”. What is the reason about that? I personally think it is still the common prejudice that being a gamedesigner means that you can play games the whole day and only have to do with the funny parts of gamedesign.

“Coding? No, let the coder-gnomes do that. 3D Art? Yeah…sure…Sound? No way…! I’m now going to write some fancy ideas and do some brainstormings about cool features in the game and afterwards I play other games to have a reference…”

I’m really sorry to destroy all your dreams, guys. But the reality looks somewhat different. Gamedesign is hard work. Gamedesign is about trying to think, how the player will react. Gamedesign is about psychology. About the human thinking and about predicting, what the player is now going to do if you give him that particular quest. As a gamedesigner, you will WRITE a lot. Word processors  and applications like Excel will be your best friends. Oh, did I mentioned the writing? You are the responsible guy for keeping the game together. To make sure, that everything fits. And not that you have some “Beaming”-features in a mediaval role playing game. Know what I mean?

But how does that look in oOC? What are the tasks of a gamedesigner there?

In oOC, I’m the responsible guy for the gamedesign document. The bible of the game. This is where all the features are described. How stuff works. Or how it is intended to work. It’s more from a player’s perspective and not from a technical one. That’s the job of the coders after I wrote my stuff. They take all my spacey features and try to put it into something useable. Also my job is to hold the guys back from having too much ideas. Often it happens, that during the design process, the feature fixing, a thousand ideas come to your mind. And you want to tell the team ALL of them. This is okay, since no idea is bad and could at least give some inspiration for other ideas. BUT, the big issue in a lot of mod project out there is, that they start to have too much features.

To be honest, everyone can think of some nice features and ideas. The point is, that writing those ideas down in the gamedesign doc is not the whole work. It’s not even 50% of it. The real work has to be done afterwards. Assets need to be created, logic has to be coded and levels have to be designed. Making a game is not writing the gamedesign document. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the whole work.

To go more into the oOC project now, currently we are in the feature finding and fixing process. We are discussing about features, that we think have to be in the game. During this process, a lot of really hard discussions happen because everybody has different views on certain things. And that’s a very good thing. This way, you are able to see a problem from ten different perspectives and that gives you the possibility to decide the right thing. We are doing this in our boards and the process looks like this…

1. Having an idea
2. Discuss about it
3. Vote about the decision
4. Include it in the feature catalogue

All in all it’s quite a creative process. But in the end, it’s a whole bunch of administrative work to do. Moderate the whole discussions, keep the concept together, kick unwanted ideas out and in the end decide about the features and document them in the design doc. Huhh…

To finish this article now…I want to make clear, that I don’t want to complain about my job. I’m in a team of really talented guys here and it’s a pleasure to work with all of them. My job is fun! Gamedesign is fun! And hey, I wanted to be a gamedesigner since I played my first game. Just like the other 98. So you want to be a gamedesigner? Then go out and try it!

Write me an eMail or comment this article below…

madcybi@openoutcast.org

Best regards,
madcybi