For aspiring Game Designers: Part II

Some advice with getting your Game Design career started.

Introduction

This is a follow-up to a previous article I wrote, cleverly called “For aspiring Game Designers”, that went over some basic tips and exercises to do to get you prepared for working as a game designer. This follow-up will build on that article and give more tips and suggestions for things you can do to improve your chances of actually getting into the game making business in the first place - it can be difficult, but there are some ways to make it a bit less daunting.

I highly recommend reading the first article before this one, as this builds on the foundation of that one. It can be found right here!

With that, let’s continue!

It is hard to get hired as a Game Designer as a newbie

Game Design is a difficult position to get hired as when you are a new person in the game industry for a few reasons:?

• There are a limited number of positions available.
• It is hard to prove your skills in a clear and concise way.?
• There are many people competing for the same roles.?

This is just the reality of it, unfortunately, but the reasons for it makes sense in the big picture, and here I will go through a few of them in more detail to explain why it is like that.

Limited number of positions available

This first point is fairly mundane and not very shocking, but the truth is that there are generally not that many people working as Game Designers at any given company, at least not when compared to other disciplines. That already makes it a more difficult position to get into by default than many others.

On top of that fact, it is also a popular discipline to get into, so the competition will be fierce for the spots that do exist. In my experience, it is also a discipline that is often filled internally by people switching to it from other disciplines (I will talk more about this further ahead, and how you can use this fact to help yourself!).

How to prove that you are a good designer?

The second point to get over, is the fact that it is extremely hard to prove that you are a good designer to someone who doesn’t know you and your work. If you don’t have a lot, or any, experience from making projects under your belt already, just think about what you would put in your portfolio at that point. Let’s compare with some other disciplines as an example:

• If you are an artist, you put some really nice art you made there. You can expand with wireframes and other “behind the scenes” shots to show of your technical competence.?
• If you are a programmer, you can always put sample code or homemade games/programs you have made.?
• Animators can make nice animations reels that show off their skills.?
• Etc.

You get the point. But what does a designer put in their portfolio to impress people? Even the most well thought through design documents don’t mean that much before the design has been seen in practice - it is quite easy to make the perfect game if you never have to actually make it, after all!

I would argue that Game Design is one of the hardest disciplines in gaming to prove your skills in (Producer is also quite difficult I imagine), especially if you don’t have any concrete practical example to point to and say “I designed that!”. Once you have worked on a project, you gain that solid example to show people that you are great at your job. It is quite a paradox that you need experience to get experience, but that is sadly how it is.

This is also a big reason for why I was adamant that you should learn to use an editor in my last article, because then you can make your designs playable, and therefore much easier to “sell” to companies looking to hire people.

Don’t be afraid of starting your career in another discipline!

Now, after that negative talk in the previous section, let’s instead talk about what you CAN do to get there! This path might take some additional time, but this can turn into a good thing, as I will talk about in this section.

My personal experience

I’ll start off with my personal experience, as I have followed this path myself, so I have first-hand experience of this method working! Here is a brief overview of my path to become a Game Designer:

• I started in a game development school called Playground Squad in Falun, Sweden. It was 2 years of mostly focusing on learning the in’s and out’s of game design, though we did learn some basics of 3D modelling and other surrounding things as well.?
• At the end of those two years, we applied to internship positions for the last 6 months of the course. I had the good fortune to be accepted into Starbreeze studios for my internship period. Not as a Game Designer, though, but instead as what they called a Gameplay Designer - this is more commonly referred to as a Level Designer or Scripter at other studios.
• After the internship, I got hired as a Gameplay Designer, which I worked as for a while before I got a somewhat random chance to focus on Combat Design full time. I started doing that instead at that point, and that is also what I got hired as at MachineGames. I worked with that for years and even ended up in a Lead position. I really liked this job, and I apparently had skills for it, but my goal was always to become a Game Designer that focused much more on the game as a whole rather than just one section of it.
• As I was working on Combat Design, I also always extended myself more and more into other parts of the game by giving suggestions for design changes and also being very vocal of what my end goal was. Then I eventually got the opportunity to focus fully on Game Design after having proven myself many times to be capable of it.

The funny thing now is that I have sort of come back more towards the Combat Design recently while still working as a Game Designer, but that is a story for another time!

How to go about this?

You can do this the way I did: start in a discipline that is adjacent to what you want - both Gameplay Designer and Level Designer are design roles too, just a different kind, for example. This will give you valuable experience and also put you in a good position to make the switch when it makes sense to.

Another entry point can also be to get a foot in the industry by joining as a member of the QA team - this is in general easier to do as the requirements for experience tend to be much lower here. From there, you can do what I did and just try to make yourself a valued member of the team, and also reaching across disciplines and offering to help when you can.?

A personal anecdote here, from my time as Combat Design Lead, is that all the people on my team started their careers as QA testers before switching, and there is a good reason for that: there are very few people that knows the game you are making as well as the QA team, so their opinions and thoughts are extremely valuable to listen to. This is especially true for designers. If they then have the drive and passion to pursue their ambitions to evolve in the industry to another position, they are at a pretty good spot to do so in my opinion.

Internships

I also want to mention that internships are an excellent way to get into a company so that you can show off how good you are! This is again something I have my own personal experience with, and have seen working in action for others many times afterward too. If you attend a game development school of some sort, they often tend to have internships as part of the course, and it will also help a lot when applying for them to have the backing of a school. Remember: internships are real experience!

What makes YOU stand out?

A lot of people are good designers, many are even excellent ones - just like you! So; what makes you stand out among the others in a line-up? What can you bring to the company outside your excellent design skills?

Why is this important?

It is an unfortunate reality that any game company will be inundated with applications for people looking for jobs in all different disciplines, and what is the most valuable thing for the recruiters will always be experience. If you have actually been part of shipping a game, then that is a receipt that you have what it takes to take a project from an idea to a finished product. If not, then the recruiter will have to take your word for it alone.

But, if you don’t have that experience yet (we all start with nothing, after all), you can still do things to increase the chances that you are the one called in for interviews over others of a similar level of experience and education as you.

Diversify your skill-set

Imagine you have a line-up of applications in front of you of people applying for the same position, and they are of equal level of experience and assumed skill-level - how do you know which one or ones to call in for an interview? This is where having additional skills that do not necessarily relate to the work applied for can really help you stand out among the crowd. Perhaps you have a degree in creative writing or a narrative degree? Perhaps you have taken some programming, 3D modelling or animation courses? Maybe you are running a YouTube/Twitch channel or podcast about games? These are only a few examples of what these additional skills could be, and now I am going to explain more about why having these additional skills might help you.

As with life in general, having more knowledge is pretty much always a positive thing (unless you are in some sort of Lovecraft story). While working with making designs for a game project, you will need to take all forms of disciplines into consideration - whatever design you make will need to work for all facets of the game:?

• Any sort of gameplay design will have programmers making the feature itself.?
• It needs audio to help both the gameplay and immerse the player.?
• It almost certainly will need art assets and animations made.?
• It may need UI implementation.
• Producers need to make space in budget and schedule for it to be made.
• Etc…?

As you can see, there is a lot to consider when making a game, and what we usually do is to communicate closely with the stakeholders from the other disciplines to make sure everyone is on board with the designs.

Now, if you happen to have some knowledge in these disciplines on your own already, you have an advantage: you can already take those things into consideration from the get go while you are making the first draft of the design! This can easy friction and amount of rewrites of it in upcoming drafts after getting the buy in from other disciplines, but it can also lead you to come up with other ideas or innovations that someone lacking that particular knowledge might miss completely - you can only draw from the knowledge you have available to you after all, and in certain cases you might not even know that you don’t know certain things, so it isn’t easy to just search up info on it either!

This is also a big part of why I’m a big proponent of not being against starting in another discipline to start with, as you get both valuable experience AND an additional set of knowledge that may help you later on become a better designer.

Specializations

On the flip side of things, another path you can take is to really double-down on a specific area of expertise and become an expert in that field. For example, there are technical artists and designers that have gone much deeper into how the tech behind everything actually works and are thus experts in the implementation side of things. They also tend to be the ones to drive future tech needs and innovations for future projects and help with getting those systems up and running in the correct way. You can similarly narrow your focus on a particular section of the game as a designer, such as for myself and my focus on AI and Combat.

Specializing in a field is something that tends to happen after a while in the business and after getting some experience, as that will help you figure out what you like doing and what you might have a knack for doing. Again, using myself as an example, I only found my love and skills for Combat and AI design after sort of stumbling into it early on in my career.?

So, with that said, I will not spend too much more time on this part as it isn’t super relevant for this article, but I still wanted to mention it as an option; the industry is moving more and more towards having more specialists in general, at least for the bigger companies. This does not mean that specialists are all that is going to exist though, and for smaller studios and Indie developers, having people who know how to do many things will always be super useful! Also, just because you are an expert in a subject does not mean that you can’t know things about other subjects too - in fact, it will help you do your job better, just like I talked about earlier in this article.

My final note on this section will be that specializing in a specific field will leave you with fewer positions to apply to, of course - companies will not need as many technical artists as general artists, for example. But, you will have a bigger chance to get the jobs you do apply for since you will have fewer competitors instead! If you become exceptional at what you do, you will likely also be able to ask for a bigger salary in the long run too.

Conclusion

Getting into the game making business is difficult for anyone without any actual game making experience, but it might be even harder for aspiring Game Designers due to how difficult it is to prove your skills to someone who has to take quite a big financial chance on you being as good as you claim to be. As stated in this article, there are a few ways you can go about lessening the hurdle you will have to clear to enter the industry.

The summarized version of the steps you can take are:

• Keep improving on your general design skills! Tips for that in my first article.
• Grab any chance you can to get some actual experience, be it game jams, internships, making your own projects etc. Anything practical that you can point to and say: “I made that!”
• Don’t be stuck with becoming a Game Designer as your first industry job - it is very difficult, and you might also lose out on experience and knowledge that can help you in the long run! Definitely try applying for Game Designs jobs if that is your goal, but don’t be devastated if you don’t get them immediately, and instead find other ways into the industry.
• Work to stand out from the crowd! Just being a great designer might not be enough, at least when you are inexperienced. Try to have additional talents that can attract recruiters to give you a chance to talk for yourself in an interview. More knowledge and skills is almost always a good thing!

Happy game making and good luck in the future!

//Jocke