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How To Start a Career in Game Design
The Lazy Designer Book 1 (Part 11 / 11)
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New Releases:
FEAST WAR Life somehow seems brighter the day the Salvation system comes online: a virtual paradise offering respite from decades of recession and warfare. But Salvation becomes a trap. Humanity sheds it flesh and falls into this digital realm, leaving a meager handful of survivors struggling in the real world. And then invaders arrive
(For those of you who read my short stories 'The Prophet' and 'The End of the Road' this novel builds some of the story between those two.)
BONE DREAMING - And Other Callings This is a collection of previously published and original fantasy short stories and includes tales about a dead man seeking closure in his relationship, a dwarf who eats stone, and a witch who burns the bones of the dead to find the living.
http://blog.brentknowles.com/brents-mailing-list/
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Crunch - Dread Nemesis or Surprise Ally?
Designers do not hate crunch. Designers embrace crunch, because it means they get to design more.
Working overtime (or crunchtime or game development hell, depending on the person talking about it) is a given in the video game industry. Furing my years with BioWare, crunchtime became significantly reduced as scheduling methods improved. Yet it still remained a necessary evil. This section focuses on how to make the most, as an employee, of the overtime you will be working.
Your First Crunch
I keep a journal and though I am not consistent with updating it anymore I looked over some old entries I had made during the crunch I served on Baldur's Gate II. One sentence I wrote was the following:
This is definitely the strangest time on a project.
I still agree with this statement. Crunch, whether it is handled poorly or turned into a strong bonding experience for the team, is always a little strange. There you are working away into the late hours... the time of night when sane humans are out at the movies or partying or sleeping. Instead you are adding seven new types of demon to the database or fixing a texture issue or debugging a plot that seems determined to work opposite of what you intended.
Crunch sometimes felt to me like a house party that refused to end... always somebody lingering in the hallway well after everybody should have went home. But good crunches were also fun, and an opportunity to bond with the others on the team working late. I interacted more with departments outside of design during crunch than I ever did during normal working hours. And I learned more too... not just about how to make a great game but also about the kinds of people who make a game great.
A Bad Crunch
Some overtime is inevitably unpleasant. Perhaps your manager has announced one of the lame kinds of crunch -- maybe forcing everybody to scan a hundred thousand lines of dialog and remove the letter 'k'. How do you make it better?
Take breaks. Wander the halls. Talk to coworkers you do not normally talk to, even the creepy guy who insists on wearing his bathrobe at 2am. Realize that everybody else is stressed out. Do not take anything personally -- if a bug is introduced just fix it. Blame and accountability and improving workflow can all be handled later... the wee hours of the morning are not the time for that.
Eat fruits and vegetables. Yeah I know that's not what you want to hear but if you are in a long-term crunch lasting weeks, if not months, you need to be eating healthy. Keep the coffee and sweet snacks to a minimum.
And bring enough food to share. Sharing makes cranky tired workers happy.
Goof off occasionally. Sending out the occasional amusing e-mail or sitting with the team and talking about what's going on in their lives is important. Taking the job too seriously makes it more stressful and while it is important to act like a professional (getting tasks done on time and to quality while being respectful to co-workers), you also need to have a bit of fun or else you won’t enjoy the job.
If you find yourself working sympathy crunch, in that even though you have no bugs of your own to take care of, do not be pissed off about it. Play the game and enjoy it for what it is, a game you helped build! If that's not enough to make you happy then be satisfied that every bug you send will make a coworker more miserable. (Though do try to be constructive.)
A Good Crunch?
So what is a good crunch? The best crunches, in my opinion, are the ones where the team, together, is aiming towards a common goal -- a demo candidate or a release candidate or even just one completed level that functions exactly as it should in the final game.
These are the ones I still remember fondly... trying for a release candidate on a game, sending each candidate out to the publisher and quickly squashing the bugs when it came back rejected. Everybody on the team could orient themselves towards that tangible goal and it was a common ground that could be talked about during breaks.
It created camaraderie, the entire team sharing the disappointment of a rejected candidate but ultimately rejoicing when a release finally passed... which meant the game had been accepted, which meant all the hard work over the months and years leading to that moment would soon be rewarded by having actual real gamers play your game.
That's the best crunch.
And...
Make crunchtime work for you; try to get the most of it. Obviously if your team or your company constantly turns to crunch as a solution for poor scheduling you need to be thinking about how to improve scheduling or moving to another studio. But when crunch is handled responsibly, it can be a fun and creative experience.
When I look over my journal of my crunch time on Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate 2 I see phrases like awesome, fulfilling, and worthwhile.
So go enjoy your overtime!
Summary
So ends the first book in the Lazy Designer series. I hope it serves as a useful primer for the early months and years of your game development career. Later books will go into more detail on specific areas that have been discussed only in general terms here with sections on prototyping, rapid iteration, scheduling, designing fun levels, building worlds, making hard managerial decisions and developing innovative and compelling storylines and characters.
Baldur’s Gate 2 was released September 2000, just a year after I had started my career at BioWare. I won’t ever forget how proud I was to walk into a store and see a game I had helped make on the shelves. Even as a junior designer I felt I had made a contribution to BG2 and will always remember that first year fondly.
THE END
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THE POOL
My first novel, "The Pool: Arrival" has excellent reviews already. I'm quite pleased by reader reaction to it! If you check it out please let me know what you thought.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Pool-Arrival-Brent-Knowles-ebook/dp/B00MVFG0TM
REVIEW OFFER: If you would like free copies of any of my books in exchange for fair reviews on Amazon, please let me know.
Finally -- If you are enjoying these excerpts, they come from the first book in the Lazy Designer series, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Career-Game-Design-Designer-ebook/dp/B005KCM7DQ/
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