What does one or a few types of typical days look like for you if you're a game designer?

Hi Eddie!

So your title is asking about "designers", but you're talking about drawing, so I'm unsure if you are asking about designers as in "game designers", or designers as in "artists", so I'm a little confused. However, I can tell you about days as a game designer!

As you guessed, there are many many different days for a game designer. And it's also incredibly dependent on what game you're working on, what company you're working with, and where that game is in terms of it's development cycle (are you still coming up with the concept? are you prototyping it out? are you making it look and feel really really good? is it already released and you're maintaining it?).

At Zynga, my days can range significantly, and it can change many times in just a week's time. For example, you could be coming up with ideas on a whiteboard then writing a spec for them (a document that talks about exactly how the feature should work, so that an engineer or artist can read the document and completely understand it when it comes time for them to program the feature or make the art for it), be in meetings to go over things that need to be done and making sure everyone on the team is on the same page, brainstorm with other people ways to make the game more fun, iterating on the ideas you already had and making them better, creating diagrams and flow charts for the various systems in the game, changing the balance numbers to make the game better, and (if you're a designer who can program) quickly prototyping out these features to see if they make sense and are enjoyable.

Also, you'll be playing the game you're working on a lot to make sure the features are working properly, making sure the game is still fun, identifying and issues with game balance ("Why can I sell this item for $90,000,000? That will ruin the money economy!" or "Oh, earning this money takes way, way too long. It's not fun. You should earn money quicker."), etc. You'll also have other people outside of the team playtest the game to see if they think the game is fun. After a certain amount of time staring at and working on a game, you need an outside set of eyes to identify issues.

Live games isn't something I have a lot of experience on, so maybe another designer can chime in about that.

I also have experience in a smaller studio kind of set up, and that's a very different experience. You end up doing many more tasks to cover all the bases that need to be covered. For example, the last small studio project I was on was a mobile game being made by myself and 4 other people, two artists, an animator, an engineer, and myself, who was both the designer and producer. As such, my job was to not only design (doing all the stuff above), but also managing the entire team and making sure everyone stayed on task, making important decisions regarding the production of the game, coming up with the team's schedule, and doing a lot of promotional stuff like creating the website, trailers, social media campaigns, hosting and recruiting for playtest sessions, etc. I also had to roll up my sleeves and program a few of the features I wanted in the game, because the one engineer we had was incredibly overwhelmed with other tasks. Additionally, I was the person in charge with creating the concepts for the UI (user interface), and seeing how the user experience felt and if they made sense, before handing them off to artists for them to create the assets for.

I've worked on as many as three games at one time, but typically at a company, you're focusing on one project at a time. That being said, you may be working on one game for a week, and then turn around and have another team asking for your help the next. It's good to be flexible!

Hope this helps. Feel free to comment or ask additional questions. I'll do my best to answer any other questions you may have.

Good luck!

Cody

You give a lot of presentations, and do a lot of writing documentation. I would recommend getting very familiar with programs like Power Point, Excel, and Word. A Game Designer's job is to come up with how the game will play, and share his or her ideas with the rest of the team to get them to agree that the idea is good. So you might have to draw some stuff to show how something works, or be able to describe it very clearly. A lot of the work I do is defining how systems or features in the game work, and work together. Many times, I will not be there to answer the questions of the person reading the document, so I need to try and think of every question that could come up - for each discipline that will work on the game.

For example, the artist will want to know different things than the engineer, and the producer will have different questions than the sound engineer, etc... The rest of the team will look at your ideas from the standpoint of their disciplines, and you need to be able to answer all of their questions. My job is about 15% coming up with ideas, 25% creating presentations, 40% documentation, and 20% answering questions.

Other things that a Game Designer is responsible for is tuning the game, and often even helping to build it (for example, assembling all of the assets created by the artists into the levels for the game). Tuning is the most important part of a games' design. Tuning is what makes a game fun. You can think of tuning as all of the math that is happening behind the screen in a game - how many hit points your hero has, how many hit points the enemies have, how much damage your sword does, how fast you run, how high you jump - how tall your characters' hit box is (determines if you can fit through that hole in the wall), how far a player has to drag her finger on the screen for it to register as a drag, how fast your gun fires, how far can the enemies see (or hear), how many points you get for blasting that alien - all of these aspects of the game and more are basically math problems that the computer is doing over and over again when you play a game.

And it's the game designer's job to make sure that the entire equation = fun.

There is a misconception that game artists "design" games because "design" sounds like you're drawing something, like a graphic designer or fashion designer. But in the industry design refers more to gameplay and game balancing and steering the user experience.

Concept Artists do all the drawing and painting all day. They are in charge of what a game LOOKS like. Designers are in charge of how the game PLAYS.

I hope this answers your question

Tiffanny