Hello there!
Let us go back behind the scenes and let us have a talk about game design. Today one of our Game Designers, Mando, is sharing his experience in the games industry with you.
Mando will give you an overview of the position and will share his thoughts about game design with you.
Can you please let us know what you do as a Game Designer?
As a game designer, my primary responsibility is to figure out what players can do in our game and how the game should respond to their actions.
What challenges do we pose to them?
How do we make the game easy to learn yet hard to master?
How do we reward players for their successes or punish them for their failures?
How do we ensure the experience is satisfying and motivating?
The answers to these questions depend significantly on the type of player we are targeting and what they enjoy and seek in games. Therefore, beyond just understanding games, a game designer should also understand gamers and their behaviors.
The specific features a game designer might focus on can vary widely, from designing a new weapon or mission to designing doors or revive mechanics.
However, the fundamental question remains the same: How do we make this piece of the puzzle fit with all the others, and how do we ensure the player enjoys it enough to want to keep playing?
What is your background, how did you get into that field of work?
After finishing high school, there were three career paths that I was fascinated by and just could not choose between:
Psychology, as I was always interested in what motivates and drives people to behave the way they do.
Technology, because working in this field would throw me into a constantly evolving work environment and there would always be new stuff to learn.
And creative work such as writing or drawing, as I could not imagine anything more fulfilling than creating something that resonates with people around the world and enriches their lives.
I pretty much randomly stumbled across game design studies in Berlin, and quickly realized that this would combine all three fields that I loved and jam them all into an awesome, fun product to work on.
And so I did my bachelor’s degree in game design, during which I also spent my nights freelancing as much as possible on every little indie game I could get my hands on, to fill my CV with practical experience. I knew that it would be hard to find a job as a game designer, so I did anything I could to tweak the odds in my favor.
My practical experience as well as the industry contacts I had made then landed me a really nice internship at a well-known studio here in Germany.
With a big name in my CV, I finally felt ready to apply at my dream companies and got accepted at YAGER, where I have been having the time of my life for the past 5 years.
How does your team look like, how does the collaboration with the other departments work for your discipline?
As a game designer I am typically embedded in a so-called feature team, an interdisciplinary group of roughly 5-10 people, all working towards one or two features at a time. The designer figures out and communicates to the team how a feature should behave and feel and what kind of balancing control will be needed, tries to get everyone excited about it, and then assists the programmers in building the feature wherever possible.
During implementation, the game designer also coordinates with artists, sound designers, writers, level designers and many others to make sure that everyone involved in the feature is aligned towards the same goals and that all the 3D models, sounds, texts, animations etc. created fit the high-level design goals for the feature.
Then, finally, the game designer makes sure that the feature makes it into company-internal playtests and gathers as much early feedback as possible, to find out what kind of changes or polishing might be needed. These new tasks are created by the team’s producer together with the designer and planned into the coming weeks.
What are the biggest challenges of video game design?
I think it’s the sheer amount of responsibility that falls on you to predict how something will be perceived by players.
As a designer, I sadly don’t have a crystal ball. All I can do is try to understand our players, who they are and what they want, and try my best to come up with something they will enjoy.
It sometimes feels almost impossible to know in advance what will be fun or motivating, what the player will understand or not, what will work with all the other systems already in the game, etc. And yet, it is the designer’s job to push for changes or additions to the game that will ultimately make it better for the player, and to do so with full confidence. Reactions from the player-base to these changes can be extremely emotional and, at times, pointed directly at developers, which requires game designers in particular to have a thick skin and a healthy dose of undying optimism.
Lastly, it can also be tricky to separate your own personal taste in games from rational arguments for the design goals of a feature. We designers are all gamers at heart, and it’s easy to come up with tons of ideas that excite us but would ultimately not be healthy for the game.
Which tools do you rely on in your daily work?
On a tool level, my work isn’t particularly fancy.
I mostly just write text documents that outline how something should behave or feel, with some graphs or illustrations for visual support thrown in there. These images I typically bash together using a standard photo editing software or occasionally draw up by hand, before scanning them into the document or slideshow I am preparing.
To balance and adjust already implemented features, I use Unreal Engine 5, by far my favorite engine and the only one used at YAGER.
I think it’s important for game designers to get their hands dirty whenever possible and to know where to find balancing values or how to tweak the main aspects of content and mechanics.
Looking back at when you started as a Designer, did your discipline change and if so, what changed? How do you think it will change in the future?
I think the main thing that has changed since my first jobs in the industry is the agility of the design process. During my studies I was taught to write a 40-page design document outlining in great detail every aspect of the game before we even started writing any code, a document that had to be maintained carefully and updated and extended every day.
This all basically went out the window as soon as I made it into a more professional environment. At YAGER, we iterate and adapt much more, constantly testing our assumptions, refining our goals and guidelines and improving existing designs.
Designs are much more focused on “what are we building right now? And what do we need to find out for the next step?”, which is much healthier for a discipline where, no matter how hard you try to plan ahead, something will always come up. In the future, I mostly expect AI tools to become more relevant. I’ve been fiddling around with them in my spare time, and it is pretty clear to me that they are getting very powerful very fast. From expediting certain stages of development thanks to rapid prototyping or speedy generation of ideas all the way to replacing entire steps in the process: AI will be a crucial part of game development in the future and will allow us to make better games, faster and cheaper.
What RPG class would the typical Game Designer be?
Definitely a Bard.
We’re focused on the Barbarians, Paladins and Rogues at the frontline, cheering for them and trying to anticipate their needs, while hyping them up with dope tunes and just wanting everyone to have a good time.