I am an aspiring Game Designer :)

"cubytes" wrote:
WTF Jossos? you don't even know me. how about you worry about yourself before you worry about me? why so hostile anyways? life's a bitch already. no reason to hate or lash out at one another. we should be encouraging uplifting and helping each other out.... like civilized human beings.

I've met so many people like you, and they are all colossal failures who don't understand a fucking thing about game creation. If you don't attempt to learn a skill, animation or programming, you are going nowhere. You will fail, you will not make any money, and no one will ever be interested in working with you because you bring nothing to the table.

You are extremely delusional if you think anyone would want to bring you into their project for your shitty ideas. The moronic nature of your posts shows me that you really think you have some value, well I'm telling you that you don't.

Learn something useful, and stop trying to trick people into doing your work for you.

User was banned for 1 month for this post by cybereality

"Jossos" wrote:

I've met so many people like you, and they are all colossal failures who don't understand a fucking thing about game creation. If you don't attempt to learn a skill, animation or programming, you are going nowhere. You will fail, you will not make any money, and no one will ever be interested in working with you because you bring nothing to the table.

You are extremely delusional if you think anyone would want to bring you into their project for your shitty ideas. The moronic nature of your posts shows me that you really think you have some value, well I'm telling you that you don't.

Learn something useful, and stop trying to trick people into doing your work for you.

apparently you just want to argue. gahhh i tried so hard to level with you too. im sorry you feel that way about me. should of foe'd you from the get go. for what its worth i am trying to learn....

"I have a Great Idea for a video game..."

Pretty much everything on that site is pure gold as far as information goes.

Also of interest and very applicable is "ALL ABOUT THE JOB OF "GAME DESIGNER"" which I will quote the start of here:

Starting out - "Game Designer" is not an entry level position. That means that if you do not have any experience working in a game company, you won't be getting hired to fill the title "Game Designer" right off the bat. You'll need to have a college degree (see Lesson 3) first, then apply for any job with a game development company or game publishing company. Game designers usually start out in Level Design, Q.A., Production, Programming, Graphics, Audio, Customer Support, or Marketing. I know one guy who's now the president of a big game company - he started out driving a forklift in the warehouse, moving boxes of games! The upshot? -- Just get in the company to start.

I think that Jossos is being a bit aggro' with you born out of the frustration of having to deal with people who think they're great games designers and don't realise that they're just like everyone else, including the people they're talking too, who all have exactly the same great ideas... only without the ability to implement them.

"FluffyFreak" wrote:
"I have a Great Idea for a video game..."

Pretty much everything on that site is pure gold as far as information goes.

Also of interest and very applicable is "ALL ABOUT THE JOB OF "GAME DESIGNER"" which I will quote the start of here:

Starting out - "Game Designer" is not an entry level position. That means that if you do not have any experience working in a game company, you won't be getting hired to fill the title "Game Designer" right off the bat. You'll need to have a college degree (see Lesson 3) first, then apply for any job with a game development company or game publishing company. Game designers usually start out in Level Design, Q.A., Production, Programming, Graphics, Audio, Customer Support, or Marketing. I know one guy who's now the president of a big game company - he started out driving a forklift in the warehouse, moving boxes of games! The upshot? -- Just get in the company to start.

I think that Jossos is being a bit aggro' with you born out of the frustration of having to deal with people who think they're great games designers and don't realise that they're just like everyone else, including the people they're talking too, who all have exactly the same great ideas... only without the ability to implement them.

Awesome advice, great read, lots of good insight there. Thanks for sharing!

I do have experience being a professional Q.A guy backed with lots of volunteer beta testing experience. Which is why I tend to focus on UX a lot. I try to think or imagine not in terms of what "feeling" I want to convey, but instead what kind of experience I want the player to have, but the two (feeling and experience abstracts) kind of go hand and hand though.

Since I have been on this forum I have been applying for internships to any start up company I find that is somewhat involved in VR. I have worked with start ups before and I absolutely love to be in a start up work environment. Seriously I get excited with helping teams improve communication and collaboration by trying out new tools like "slack" for instance or helping new start ups get set up with a domain and tools such as google apps. Oddly enough monotonous IT/ops/communication stuff fascinates me. I love experimenting and implementing new productivity tools. Then Its like "yoo why are we having these generic meetings like we are stuck in the 90s when we now have automatically synced calendars and maintain synced real time chat channels with the whole team? lets do something more interesting or something more productive with this allocated meeting time"

As far as what I am interested in learning;
-I would like to be a designer, an art/animation guy not a top level game director (although that would be my career goal)
-personally im more interested in learning animation then art in general but the two kind of go hand and hand...
-right now im studying and playing around with blender
-would love to learn and play around with maya creative suite on a proper workstation
-not sure where i would fit in best.. modelling? texturing? animation? particles? all of the above?

but given my experience with being a DJ (as a hobby) i think my talent (if you can call it that) is more of a content mixer/organizer more so then a content producer... if that makes any sense.

not sure i am cut out to be a programmer. although I am tech savvy enough to understand the underlining principles. and since i am interested in pretty much everything (which makes it hard for someone like me to specialize in anything) i have been practicing ruby with this: http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0 and of course practicing js on khan academy...

although im kind of on the fence...and not sure where I would fit best which is why i made this soul searching post in the first place

I am also considering taking a different approach and focusing on;
-photo shopping & video editing
-film production and movie design
-set design and lighting
-costume design
-casting
-screen play and writing

so that I would bring some movie magic to team and to be honest many games from this generation and VR specifically are really blurring the lines between movie and game... I wouldn't be surprised to see Oculus begin to start hiring hollywood aficionados specifically directors like James Cameron!

so i am considering in going at game design from the perspective of making movies!

also in regards to your psychoanalysis of Jossos post im not so sure its general frustration. it seems more like a direct personal attack to me. i even tried to level with the guy and he just snaps right back at me. but no worries i have foe'd him and going forward im just going to ignore the guy since im not on this forum to argue with anyone.

besides if i was like every other "idea guy" who thinks his ideas are awesome and better then anyone else's I wouldn't have made this honest "soul searching" thread to begin with....

As someone who actually programs games and does animation, you would do well to heed my advice. Most people are too nice to tell you the truth. I know what it takes to program games as I've done so, both the logic, low-end stuff, graphics, and even made the models/animation/other 3D assets. I am slowly getting into the industry more and more.

NEVER have I, nor any other developers I know needed an ideas guy. It just doesn't happen. We all have ideas of our own, and the only way anyone is going to want to work with you is if you are filling their pockets with cash.

Now if you ignore my advice and don't try to specialize in any field, you will be a colossal failure and never be part of any game project. That's the truth, and you are not original, nor humble or any of that other crap.

Get out and invest a few years in something.

I'm going to echo Jossos's sentiment, even if I disagree with the way he expressed it. There's something to be said for harsh truths, but if they're too harsh it becomes easy to brush them off as a personal attack; as 'someone having a bad day'.

You need to understand what a game designer actually is, and more importantly why. An excellent starting point is this article: http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/

If answering the kind of questions posed in that article, thoroughly and completely, isn't your idea of a fun job - then you don't want to be a game designer, because that's 90% of what they do. You're angling for 'creative director', which is what you (might) get to do when you've earned your stripes as a designer down in the trenches.

Assuming you're still on board, take a second look at those questions, and appreciate that answering them all will involve a whole complex of compromises, trading off art, programming, hardware constraints, staffing and deadlines. You would not believe how easy it is for a careless designer to throw in some seemingly innocuous detail that ends up in a paid project milestone, and doubles everyone's workload because he didn't understand the ramifications. Do NOT be that guy.

Now, ask yourself: can I still be the big-picture ideas guy, working within those constraints? Do I even know what those constraints are? If you can't or don't, then you're a liability to everyone around you. If you can, then you'll be a supremely valued member of the team.

Still here? Ok.

The next question is: how do you become a game designer?

One of the best ways, especially these days, what with all the excellent middleware that takes away 99% of the technical difficulty, is to make a game. Frankly, if you can't bring yourself to learn a bit of scripting or the animation interface on Unity, you just don't care enough about what you're doing.

If your immediate reaction is that you can't, that you wouldn't know where to start making the kind of game you want to make, that your ideas are too big, then you haven't properly grasped the significance of the preceding steps. Your lack of experience or ability are constraints - and good designers thrive on constraints. What are the most efficient, economical, good-value ways to push back against those constraints? What inspiration can you derive from them? What kind of game CAN you make?

One example - not so much of a brilliant 'big picture' game design, or even of a successful game, but of exercising the kind of design skills I'm talking about developing, is the game I've just released (and linked on this board, so I won't do it again here).

When designing and creating 'Clamber', there were a lot of constraints:

* I can't draw
* I've never animated anything
* I didn't have much time
* I have minimal musical ability
* Small memory/download footprint
* No budget for elaborate tutorials
* Simple touch interface
* Must be easily expandable
* Must be easily scalable (to different hardware capabilities to maximise reach)

Everything about the game was shaped by these constraints. I needed an art style that would stand out and look attractive without requiring much artistic ability or experience, and which would allow me to rapidly create content in bulk without using masses of art assets. Thus the kid-craft look. The music was kept simple and relaxed, because that's about all I could do with a Tracker program without embarrassing myself. The whole game plays out in a single scene with no UI as such. There's some simple animation, but most of it is physics.

I think the end result is pretty good, but what I'm most proud of is that because I 'did design' the right way (designing within a carefully thought-out specification involving constraints) rather than just striking out for some random blue-sky idea, I actually made and released it in the amount of time I had allotted myself.

To veer slightly back towards Jossos's tone: if all this sounds too menial, or complicated, or difficult, or unappealing, then go choose a different career. Whatever you do, DON'T bluff your way onto some dev team and make their lives miserable.

I'm going to echo Jossos's sentiment, even if I disagree with the way he expressed it. There's something to be said for harsh truths, but if they're too harsh it becomes easy to brush them off as a personal attack; as 'someone having a bad day'.

You need to understand what a game designer actually is, and more importantly why. An excellent starting point is this article: http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/

If answering the kind of questions posed in that article, thoroughly and completely, isn't your idea of a fun job - then you don't want to be a game designer, because that's 90% of what they do. You're angling for 'creative director', which is what you (might) get to do when you've earned your stripes as a designer down in the trenches.

Assuming you're still on board, take a second look at those questions, and appreciate that answering them all will involve a whole complex of compromises, trading off art, programming, hardware constraints, staffing and deadlines. You would not believe how easy it is for a careless designer to throw in some seemingly innocuous detail that ends up in a paid project milestone, and doubles everyone's workload because he didn't understand the ramifications. Do NOT be that guy.

Now, ask yourself: can I still be the big-picture ideas guy, working within those constraints? Do I even know what those constraints are? If you can't or don't, then you're a liability to everyone around you. If you can, then you'll be a supremely valued member of the team.

Still here? Ok.

The next question is: how do you become a game designer?

One of the best ways, especially these days, what with all the excellent middleware that takes away 99% of the technical difficulty, is to make a game. Frankly, if you can't bring yourself to learn a bit of scripting or the animation interface on Unity, you just don't care enough about what you're doing.

If your immediate reaction is that you can't, that you wouldn't know where to start making the kind of game you want to make, that your ideas are too big, then you haven't properly grasped the significance of the preceding steps. Your lack of experience or ability are constraints - and good designers thrive on constraints. What are the most efficient, economical, good-value ways to push back against those constraints? What inspiration can you derive from them? What kind of game CAN you make?

One example - not so much of a brilliant 'big picture' game design, or even of a successful game, but of exercising the kind of design skills I'm talking about developing, is the game I've just released (and linked on this board, so I won't do it again here).

When designing and creating 'Clamber', there were a lot of constraints:

* I can't draw
* I've never animated anything
* I didn't have much time
* I have minimal musical ability
* Small memory/download footprint
* No budget for elaborate tutorials
* Simple touch interface
* Must be easily expandable
* Must be easily scalable (to different hardware capabilities to maximise reach)

Everything about the game was shaped by these constraints. I needed an art style that would stand out and look attractive without requiring much artistic ability or experience, and which would allow me to rapidly create content in bulk without using masses of art assets. Thus the kid-craft look. The music was kept simple and relaxed, because that's about all I could do with a Tracker program without embarrassing myself. The whole game plays out in a single scene with no UI as such. There's some simple animation, but most of it is physics.

I think the end result is pretty good, but what I'm most proud of is that because I 'did design' the right way (designing within a carefully thought-out specification involving constraints) rather than just striking out for some random blue-sky idea, I actually made and released it in the amount of time I had allotted myself.

To veer slightly back towards Jossos's tone: if all this sounds too menial, or complicated, or difficult, or unappealing, then go choose a different career. Whatever you do, DON'T bluff your way onto some dev team and make their lives miserable.

Hey Peeling! Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, feedback, advice and insight.

Also I love that article! Thanks for sharing. Hilarious! It also raises a really good point too. In fact I am going to print that article out and tape it to my bedroom door ASAP :)

I agree with you 110%

On a personal note: I wish you the best of luck with your project and all of your future endeavors!

Have you really been playing with blender? If so, post a screenshot. You might get better responses if you show what you've done so far, even if it's a simple untextured box room.

Are you high on cannabis when you write these ideas? Just curious. Not that there's anything morally wrong with it if you are (I'm in the Bay Area and it's decriminalized here). It's just I know some cannabis users who share a lot of the same logic and thought processes as you, especially when they're hella faded.

"Jose" wrote:
Have you really been playing with blender? If so, post a screenshot. You might get better responses if you show what you've done so far, even if it's a simple untextured box room.

Are you high on cannabis when you write these ideas? Just curious. Not that there's anything morally wrong with it if you are (I'm in the Bay Area and it's decriminalized here). It's just I know some cannabis users who share a lot of the same logic and thought processes as you, especially when they're hella faded.

hahaha I wish! There is a bill that is trying to decriminalize it for "medicinal use" here in FL.

I have nothing against Marijuana per say, and as far as mind altering substances goes it is relatively non toxic. However its effects are pretty intense for some (especially on first use case) or smoking a whole blunt of loud. It can produce an intense psychedelic experience that might freak out some people who are not mentally prepared for it and/or expecting it. After the first use though, once tolerance sets in THC is considerably less psychedelic and more of a buzz...

Personally I drink way to must caffeine (coffee, soda, tea) to fully enjoy the effects of Sativa. The two don't mix real well with my body chemistry so I had to quit. Which is to say when I am faded I tend to experience a state of perpetual anxiety in the form of paranoia-of-awkwardness and borderline glitchy transcendence. I call it "reality feedback" as if reality itself appears to spontaneously become highly personalized and relevant. Indica would be more my style. Perhaps one of these days I will cut back and get off the caffeine and Sativa won't be so prone to induce anxiety but then again I really love my morning coffee and my afternoon teas (sweet tea, green tea, herbal tea)! So naturally I have been more of a "night toker" ensuring I have absolutely no responsibilities. I honestly can't see how people can blaze all day everyday ( I know a lot of people like that). I just get way too stupid when I am stoned....

Sure Marijuana has the tendency to improve overall creativity that much I agree. However I think it is more like THC just alleviates the monotony of a repetitive creative process and takes out that jaded feeling you get when starting from scratch all over again looking at a blank canvas.

Although under the influence of Marijuana you are in a state of altered consciousness after all. So naturally your perception of reality is warped as a result. I can't tell you how many times I have been working on a mix get a few loops going together that sound absolutely amazing when I am faded, but the next day I listen to it and be like "WTF was I thinking...?" So there is a bit of a trade-off...

As far as blender goes I am starting from scratch so basically I am just spawning cubes and spheres reshaping them, re positioning them and moving them around a bit while trying to get a feel for the interface and learn what all the tools are for. I have watched a few beginner tutorials on youtube but I got side tracked and ended up watching a bunch of Maya videos...

Jossos was out of line, and has been banned for 1 month. There is no need to be mean like that.

I will also be keeping a close eye on him. One more post like that and he will be banned forever.