Would you recommend any specialist training, courses or books to people interesting in becoming a designer or writer?
One of the many tasks I’ve been involved in has been recruiting. It can be soul destroying to have to turn people down, and not because they are bad people. Over the years we’ve seen some good people who have, quite frankly, been rendered almost useless by the education that they have received. Worse still, many of them are saddled with debts for the rubbishy courses that they’ve been on.
We do have a couple of people with games-design-type degrees working on TW games, but they are relatively junior because they only started here recently. I’ve known designers have degrees as varied as archaelogy, psychology, civil engineering (very useful, being able to make good concrete), business and journalism. For my own part I gained an Open University BSc degree at the same time as writing all the text for RTW but then I was mad, looking back. A wide range of skills, interests and experiences among the design staff has actually been quite useful to us at CA. The same has been true elsewhere in my experience, so I’d have to say that doing a degree that fully engages your attention and getting a damn good result is far more use to you than a mediocre achievement in a games industry-related subject. University might be your last chance to do what you want to do to the exclusion of all else before the wonderful world of work, so why not do something that you think is insanely great and interesting?
So, I’m not sure that specialist training pays off in the long run. That’s not gospel, just a feeling. There are now many courses that aim to offer a grounding for the games industry and some are worth the money. You just have to be very careful where you go. I’m not going to name and shame any particular courses, because by the time you’re reading these words things may have changed. As a very rough rule of thumb, however, try this: if a games design course is part of a university or college’s graphics department, give it a wide berth. There is, in our opinion, a good deal more to games design and creation than just being able to do really neat concept sketches of characters and the platforms they jump about on. There are other places that offer extremely good training but these can be spotted because the games courses are firmly embedded in the IT faculty. Good courses and departments will offer the chance of internships at development houses, and a course that offers such a feature is likely to be better than the normal run because a development company cannot afford to mess about offering placements to people who aren’t getting good training.
If you want to be a writer in the games industry, being able to write is an advantage, and not just with crayons. I’ve also noticed that quite a lot of games journalists use their journalism as a springboard into a development job. Stringing words together in a way that interests, entertains, informs, moves and engages a reader is a worthy craft but not one that everyone can do. That said, there are some writers out there who make a tidy living by relying on editors to clean up their maunderings. A formal English (or other language) qualification or training in “creative writing” will help with certain kinds of projects. Creative writing is little help with TW games, for example, because there’s no real narrative, as previously mentioned. Being able to write cleanly and quickly will stand anyone in good stead in getting – and keeping – a job as a games writer. And being able to change all your words as soon as they’re finished because everyone else has changed the design, put a skateboarding duck in it, or simply couldn’t read the longer words that you used.
Finally, have you got any other advice or messages for those wanting to break into the industry?
Do something more socially useful! Heal the sick! Grow food! Care for the halt and lame! Save fallen women! Dig ditches! Make bread! Fix airconditioning!
Oh, if you must have an answer.
Play games, but not to the exclusion of everything else. If you’re going to be involved in design, you have no way of knowing what obscure piece of knowledge or strange skill will prove useful in what you are doing. And don’t necessarily limit your game playing to console or PC titles. There’s nothing wrong with paper and board games either – the mechanics of those have to be open to the player and should be elegant (code for “individually simple, but appropriately so, building into something bigger than the sum of the parts”) in a good game. Pulling a boardgame to pieces to work out how it hangs together is a good design exercise. Nearly all the other TW designers at CA have a background that included playing boardgames, paper RPGs and miniature wargames, although that could be a function of age rather than anything else.
The other thing that can stand you in good stead is modding. Reverse engineering games’ data is clever, and can show you how things hang together under the hood to a limited extend, but there’s a world of difference between modding and starting with a blank sheet of paper. One of the big shocks for modders when they start working on games instead of modding them is that they are expected to keep quiet about what they are doing, other than with colleagues. Non-disclosure and commercial confidentiality are serious things.
Keep applying for jobs, but be realistic about your chances. The games industry is seen as an exciting thing, and it’s definitely better than the usual run of office jobs. That means that many, many, many people are applying for each job and you’ll need something out of the ordinary in your CV/resume to get you noticed: a “unique selling point”, as it were. And if you’re applying for a job outside your native country, make sure that you read up the immigration and work permit rules for your proposed destination. Companies have to jump through administrative hoops to get some workers in, so make sure that (a) they can actually do it for you and (b) you’re really worth the effort. Otherwise, it won’t matter how lovely you are because your chosen employer simply won’t be able to get you a permit to do the job. We’ll have to wait and see how the recession affects international mobility of labour, but there’s a good chance that governments will become more protectionist towards their local workers in all kinds of sneaky ways.
You’ll see a lot of job adverts talking about “a passion for games”, and that’s all very well but you can’t rely on passion in the long run. And the reason why you don’t want to run on passion alone is: will it sustain you for years? You might be working on the same game for years. Passion will get you started, but you need a less emotional motivation for the long haul, and making good games takes years. It’s not a brief fling. Passion – for anything or anybody – is very high maintenance and ultimately draining. If you think that passion alone is going to carry you through your working life, then you’re likely to be disappointed and have your passion crushed by the inevitable setbacks that will come. And passionate love thwarted is likely to become its opposite very quickly, which is something you don’t want. And it’s a sad fact that there are exploitative companies out there that will use the game-loving passions of their staff to fuel development through unpaid overtime, crunch working and eventually burnout. It’s not a great way to develop good games, but it goes on a lot. Far too much, to be honest, and this is why games sometimes repeat mistakes, because a whole bunch of new people are being used to make a game, and they’ve lost the experience of the old people who have moved on.
From a personal perspective, you’ll needed to learn and to wait before your dream job appears. There’s a simple reason for this: a lot of money is spent during a game’s development cycle and no one, except a love-lorn mooncalf, is going to trust their investment to someone who has a limited, or worse still, no track record. That said, this does happen, and the results can be (to use that word again) “interesting”. In an ideal world, you’ll want to serve an “apprenticeship” that will involve a lot of work on other people’s ideas. You’ll want to work adding data and tweaking values, as well as creating lists of artwork, sound effects, game features, lists of lists, more data, bugs, features, text, more text, and artwork that got forgotten the first time round. That way, you have a good grounding in the practical skills you’ll need and understand what’s going on in the design process. A blank piece of paper won’t scare you any more. In other words, you shouldn’t get admitted to the mafia until you’ve made your bones.
How do I desgin a game like Total war?
Originally Posted by Monk
Re: How do I desgin a game like Total war?
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