1 answer
Phiseth
Student
Lynn, Massachusetts
1
Question
Updated
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In game development what is the development process like?
Im a Junior in highschool and find video games and their creation really interesting since a young age and want to know more about the things that you have to do in the creation of those games. What do you on the daily? What are factors that can make your job easier or harder? How hard is the learning process to become a developer? #video-games #games #game-industry #art #programming
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1 answer
Ryan Kim
Game Design
1
Answer
Los Angeles, California
Updated
Ryan’s Answer
This is a fairly broad question but I hope the following will be able to assist you.
To answer your questions:
A. What do you do on the daily?
What game designers do varies greatly on the size of the game development team, and the role of each member on said team.
The size of the game development team you are working with can greatly alter the workflow and resources that you have at your disposal. Start-up and indie companies can literally be meeting up in someone's garage or living room while everyone works on computers and laptops to working at a AAA company in an office building with dedicated workstations specifically tailored to each role. With something like a start-up or indie company, the size of the team can be anywhere from two to maybe 15 people at most whereas AAA companies can have two to 15 people for each role with leads. The role you take on for the team (e.g. producer, artist, programmer, etc) would obviously change your day-to-day work; however, explaining each and every role would be out of scope for this question. I would recommend looking into the different roles in a game design team to find what is best for you.
B. What are factors that can make your job easier or harder?
Factors that can make the job easier are by having a team that understands how to take feedback. Things that make it harder would be by having a team that doesn't understand how to take feedback.
Feedback is a very broad word. If you choose to commit to the game design field, you will learn a lot about how to take feedback, learn how to understand that feedback, and also learn how to stop yourself from blocking out feedback that sounds wrong, hurtful, and just flat out makes you question your own identity. I would love to discuss more how to do just that but it would be out of scope for this question. All you need to know is that game design is about giving feedback, but more importantly, it's about receiving feedback. A lot of the game design process is about asking for feedback, and then being able to digest and interpret that feedback properly. If parts of the team are just simply unable to interpret feedback properly, it will very much so make the job very very hard.
C. How hard is the learning process to become a developer?
The learning process in terms of understanding the fundamentals of game design such as vocabulary and theory can be a little confusing, but that can be said with learning anything for the first time.
Of course, like with any subject, every field is going to introduce new topics and ways of thinking. You may not agree with some of the things that are being taught but the thing that matters most about learning about how to become a game developer/designer is that it's a completely new realm of thinking. You can say it's a STEM major because there's programming that needs to be done when it comes to making video games, and you can say it's an art major because there are art and narrative things that need to be done. However, when it comes to the field of design, it really is a completely different kind of thinking. A lot of it is trying a bunch of things, showing people unfinished work, asking for feedback, and then choosing to decide whether or not you want to continue further development on that idea, or scrap it entirely and start again. Now that may sound unsettling or wrong because we are not used to showing things that we think might not work or things that people might not like but that's just the design field.
To answer your questions:
A. What do you do on the daily?
What game designers do varies greatly on the size of the game development team, and the role of each member on said team.
The size of the game development team you are working with can greatly alter the workflow and resources that you have at your disposal. Start-up and indie companies can literally be meeting up in someone's garage or living room while everyone works on computers and laptops to working at a AAA company in an office building with dedicated workstations specifically tailored to each role. With something like a start-up or indie company, the size of the team can be anywhere from two to maybe 15 people at most whereas AAA companies can have two to 15 people for each role with leads. The role you take on for the team (e.g. producer, artist, programmer, etc) would obviously change your day-to-day work; however, explaining each and every role would be out of scope for this question. I would recommend looking into the different roles in a game design team to find what is best for you.
B. What are factors that can make your job easier or harder?
Factors that can make the job easier are by having a team that understands how to take feedback. Things that make it harder would be by having a team that doesn't understand how to take feedback.
Feedback is a very broad word. If you choose to commit to the game design field, you will learn a lot about how to take feedback, learn how to understand that feedback, and also learn how to stop yourself from blocking out feedback that sounds wrong, hurtful, and just flat out makes you question your own identity. I would love to discuss more how to do just that but it would be out of scope for this question. All you need to know is that game design is about giving feedback, but more importantly, it's about receiving feedback. A lot of the game design process is about asking for feedback, and then being able to digest and interpret that feedback properly. If parts of the team are just simply unable to interpret feedback properly, it will very much so make the job very very hard.
C. How hard is the learning process to become a developer?
The learning process in terms of understanding the fundamentals of game design such as vocabulary and theory can be a little confusing, but that can be said with learning anything for the first time.
Of course, like with any subject, every field is going to introduce new topics and ways of thinking. You may not agree with some of the things that are being taught but the thing that matters most about learning about how to become a game developer/designer is that it's a completely new realm of thinking. You can say it's a STEM major because there's programming that needs to be done when it comes to making video games, and you can say it's an art major because there are art and narrative things that need to be done. However, when it comes to the field of design, it really is a completely different kind of thinking. A lot of it is trying a bunch of things, showing people unfinished work, asking for feedback, and then choosing to decide whether or not you want to continue further development on that idea, or scrap it entirely and start again. Now that may sound unsettling or wrong because we are not used to showing things that we think might not work or things that people might not like but that's just the design field.