How do I desgin a game like Total war?

[Napoleon The Emperor Of Europe]

I want to become a games designer ,mayber laterr.could someone lend me some help on how to create games like Shogun 2?Or NTW?

[Monk]

Stay in school.
Get a degree in programming.
Drink your milk.
Eat your vegetables.

You know, the basics.

[Napoleon The Emperor Of Europe]

Stay in school.
Get a degree in programming.
Drink your milk.
Eat your vegetables.

You know, the basics.

I had only asked,just you know ,how to desgin a game

Not revive insults from you.

[Napoleon The Emperor Of Europe]

Stay in school.
Get a degree in programming.
Drink your milk.
Eat your vegetables.

You know, the basics.

There are people who make mods,I just need to get some experince,and you oppose it.

[Monk]

I had only asked,just you know ,how to desgin a game

Not revive insults from you.

I wasn't insulting you at all, actually. If you want to learn how to code and create a game you really do need to get some kind of education. Not one of those 'gaming' degrees you see advertised on television but something in programming.

There are people who make mods,I just need to get some experince,and you oppose it.

If you consider giving you two legitimate responses and two very lame attempts at joke responses to be tantamount to opposition, then I'd hate to see what you'd consider support.

[Napoleon The Emperor Of Europe]

I wasn't insulting you at all, actually. If you want to learn how to code and create a game you really do need to get some kind of education. Not one of those 'gaming' degrees you see advertised on television but something in programming.



If you consider giving you two legitimate responses and two very lame attempts at joke responses to be tantamount to opposition, then I'd hate to see what you'd consider support.

erm...I'm not getting really what you say.

[Gregoshi]

Napoleon, please stop taking every comment made to you as an insult.

Monk gave you valid advice and a lame joke or two.

[Monk]

Monk gave you [...] a lame joke or two.

Coming from you that means a lot, Gregoshi.

[Gregoshi]

Coming from you that means a lot, Gregoshi.

I like to recognize accomplishments when I see them - and I know a lot about lame humour.

[knoddy]

i have a mate who is currently at university learning to make computer games. I myself studied at uni for a couple of years before giving up cos i couldnt stand programming haha! its quite complex and difficult. Modding is slightly easier because you generally deal with txt files and most of the stuff is already modded. That said i know some of the mods out there are extremely complex and they do right alot of code for them (dont want to offend modders by sayings its easy XD) i used to mod RTW, but nothing to the scale of the big mods that are out there.

so long and short of it.

Go to uni do a degree in Comp Sci, Or software engi. usually in your 3rd or 4th year you can choose to do gaming subjects that teach you how to code games.

[edyzmedieval]

Monk gave you valid advice and a lame joke or two.

Punned.

[Kobal2fr]

One thing I learned (which quickly set me off that particular path) is that game design, much like most computer related endeavours, is all about maths. Algorithms, memory allocations, physics engines, AIs, graphics, whatever - there's always advanced maths behind it.

Which sucks, because as we all know, maths sucks. At least physics you can approximate and fumble your way through, but math is as unforgiving as it's a pain in the neck.
So, with that in mind, if you suck at math, or merely dislike maths (because you can't expect to excel in a field you hate), forget about making computer games. Just give up. No and, ifs or buts. Everyone's got ideas about the best game ever, which is why gaming studios don't hire people on ideas. Ideas are worth spit unless you can code your idea in your basement and then show it to them. You can't do that unless you're ace at coding, and thus are ace at maths.

If that's not you, then sorry kid. Better change heading as early as possible.

Of course, there's always the Lusted way to success - make good mods, have thousands of people use and praise your mods, then bargain on that. But frankly, that's not a predictable way. The Tao of Lusted is fraught with uncertainty and it'll toss you on your ass without warning. Then again, if you already have a day job, then what do you have to lose ?

[crpcarrot]

@ OP first of you sound very young (thats not an insult jsut an observation)

like MOnk said get an education first second dont start with a game like TW you cant build a game like it alone try somehting simple and work youself up. like Kobal says maths and logic is very important is very important for this sort of game design.

[Captain Fishpants]

I want to become a games designer ,mayber laterr.could someone lend me some help on how to create games like Shogun 2?Or NTW?

Hi --

Just to quote myself (from over here on the CA website):

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.

Although that was written a couple of years ago, I stand by what I said. Designers, by the way, don't necessarily need to code or have exceptional maths skills, but they'd best have an ability to think things through in detail, and then be able to express their ideas very, very clearly.

Hope that helps.

MikeB

[Napoleon The Emperor Of Europe]

Hi --

Just to quote myself (from over here on the CA website):



Although that was written a couple of years ago, I stand by what I said. Designers, by the way, don't necessarily need to code or have exceptional maths skills, but they'd best have an ability to think things through in detail, and then be able to express their ideas very, very clearly.

Hope that helps.

MikeB

Thank you.

Its much better than all the others have given theirs.

I want to work at CA,so really in a way this,what you said has helped me a lot.

How would they express their ideas clearly?

Can you show me a example please?

[knoddy]

I’ve known designers have degrees as varied as archaelogy, psychology, civil engineering (very useful, being able to make good concrete), business and journalism

ive got a degree in ancient history/arcaeology !!! *hint hint nudge nudge* lol

[Napoleon The Emperor Of Europe]

[QUOTE=Napoleon The Emperor Of Europe;2053282598]Thank you.

Its much better then the others have given theirs.

I want to work at CA,so really in a way this,what you said has helped me a lot.

Well erm,thank you

[akinkhoo]

I wasn't insulting you at all, actually. If you want to learn how to code and create a game you really do need to get some kind of education. Not one of those 'gaming' degrees you see advertised on television but something in programming.

i have a diploma in digital entertainment, a degree in computer science, and another major in multimedia and game. Had being involved in the programming military simulator used for army training. but I can tell you that an education in computers alone ain't useful to getting a gaming career or help you in designing a game.

designing, as the word implies is about design. the concept of a game is far more complicated than just write lines of codes.

besides, computer science do not cover the math involved in 3d nor the optimization involved to allow the program to run at realtime. (the correct degree to pursuit is "Realtime Interactive Simulation")

computer science do not cover design and art production, i did a separate major to learn that. being able to write a program is quite different from being able to make a game. the reality is... if you don't know the concept of animation, how do you write a program that compute that? if you don't know the concept of game balancing, how do you handle your variable? how do you design an AI if you can't even win a battle yourself!?

there are commercially available game engine a designer can use to avoid heavy coding, what we would call scripting, you can even get a free copy of unreal and play with the editor(it hard and overwhelming, but it can be done)... but there are no commercially available "design" u can get off the shelf. sorry but i seen alot of people take the wrong route and gave wrong advice, but game is always about the design, not programming.

that is not to say programmer don't have a place, i do have a computer science degree. but becoming a programmer is different from becoming a game programmer. game programmer has to know game design, and have abit of passion and style!

---

now for the serious answer, how do I design a game like total war? uhm, you probably need a couple of dozen of artist, modeller, animators, texturer, sound engineer etc. in additional to your game designers that must document(yes, document!) all the variables that would affect the game(ie. morale etc), and finally a programming team of specialist doing the graphics, gameplay, ui, ai, multiplayer, intergration with steam-ing uhm, and even packing everything into an installer too. you will need beta testers, people to deal with the publishers, HR people to make sure everyone get paid or they will turn into RONIN on you!


so it bring us to the first lesson my mentor taught me some 7 years ago: "start small", try and make a 2d game first, with just 1 gameplay element(say run around avoiding giant pizza falling on you or something basic)... then add something else and repeat the process... it will take you a few years to uncover all the stuff but you will get to a level where you have the ability to design the game you want.

this is why game development requires abit of passion... you have to stick around a few years before you get your fruit of labour... GL!