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              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC">volume 
                1, issue 26</font></b></font></p>
              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC"> 
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              <p>  <p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b><font color="#339900" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Today 
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        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0022A8"><b><a target="" href="../../corner/index.html"><font size="-1">Beaker's 
          Bent</font></a><font size="-1">:</font></b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+3" color="#0022A8"><br>
          What does a game designer do?</font></p>
        <p align="RIGHT"><font color="#804000"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By 
          Rich &quot;<a target="_self" href="mailto:rich@loonygames.com">Beaker</a>&quot; 
          Wyckoff</font></b></font></p>
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        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Once the longer proposal 
          has been approved the project gets under way officially and a designer’s 
          work really begins. Although the game proposal may have set an overall 
          look for the game and set out some ideas about plot, characters, monsters, 
          and the like, it is far from a fully-developed, set-in-stone description. 
          The proposal is created mostly to get management approval (or in the 
          case of start-up developers, funding), and thus it necessarily does 

          not involve the whole team. Once it has been approved, the team can 
          be hired, and then the process of turning some pictures and words into 
          an entire game begins.</font>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">After the proposal goes through, 
          the full game design document will be created, with as much input from 
          the entire team as possible. This &quot;design doc&quot; ideally lists 
          every single item that will need to be created in order to ship the 
          game. This is where a designer’s skills are first and most crucially 
          needed, but sadly I have met many in the industry, especially those 
          doing 3D, who devalue the design doc because of the difficulties of 
          trying to accurately predict everything which will be needed, especially 
          when the technology the game will run on is not implemented. This is 
          a shame, because being able to create a useful design document is the 
          most important skill a general designer can have.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The fact that there are any 
          designers in the industry at all who scoff at design docs is an example 
          of the industry’s own most common misconception about designers: that 
          they don’t need to know anything except how to &quot;build levels.&quot; 
          Almost any game today, 3D or not, has some sort of editor which is used 
          to assemble art assets into playable data. Constructing the levels consumes 
          the bulk of most projects’ schedules. It is easy to see how less perceptive 
          management could confuse level building with game design, but they are 
          not the same. </font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Pure Level builders do not 
          necessarily need any skills beyond knowledge of how to use an editor 
          for a specific game or game genre to construct levels. Designers need 
          to be able to build levels, but they need to understand how to generalize 
          their experience in level editors from different games or even different 
          genres and even explain to the programming team what kind of editor 
          they will need to build the game which has been described in the game 
          proposal management approved. On top of this, designers need to be skillful 
          enough to handle many other random tasks on a game, from dialogue writing 
          to game script coding to weapon damage tweaking to model building, in 
          order to fill in holes in the schedule or just do gameplay research.</font></p>
        <p>&nbsp;</p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Many people employed as level 
          builders have the designer’s ability to generalize their experience, 
          make plans, and perform all sorts of tasks, and could serve as general 
          designers. Many general designers actually spend most of their time 
          building levels. Nonetheless, it is important to note that these are 
          two different disciplines - some companies even put their level builders 
          in their art department rather than the design department. Both roles 
          are important, but general designers are especially important, for reasons 
          that will soon become clear.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">In the early days of computer 
          game development, there were at first only programmers, and then programmers 
          and artists, and they did all the parts of the game building which a 
          designer would handle now. One of the major roles designers fulfill 
          at a company is to allow artists and programmers to concentrate on their 
          parts of the project. Modern games have increasingly high production 
          values, and it is almost never feasible to have anyone who is both a 
          programmer or artist and a designer - the difficulty of switching between 
          such different types of work leads to a high degree of inefficiency.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The advantage that was lost 
          when the task of creating the gameplay was split off from technology 
          and art creation was the ability to integrate all the parts of the game 
          easily and seamlessly. Now, an artist who can build and paint amazing 
          characters may have no idea what sort of environments they are going 
          to go in or how to put them there, and a programmer writing a physics 
          system may have no idea of what kind of puzzles are in the design doc 
          or how to test them. It is a designer’s job to be able to communicate 
          with all the other people on the project and make sure everyone knows 
          how their part fits into the minute-to-minute play of the game. This 
          sort of very microscopic attention to detail can’t be handled by the 
          game’s project leader, because they will be dealing with bigger issues 
          than the fact that all the blue creatures suddenly clash with a now-orange 
          level, so it falls upon the designer to work through or even anticipate 
          and prevent these situations.</font></p>
        <p> </p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">So besides being a good planner, 
          a designer needs to be an excellent communicator. In game making, effective 
          communication requires in-depth knowledge of all the different facets 
          of game production, again ruling out the specialists. The best designers 
          today have a background in art and/or programming, and thus can make 
          reasonable requests and suggestions to the programmers and artists. 
          The worst designers have never taken a programming class or opened up 
          Photoshop or MAX, and thus have unrealistic expectations for what programmers 
          can do and no idea how to suggest ideas for tricks with textures or 
          3D models to an artist.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">In the end, although a designer 
          may end up doing a lot of level building, or may write hundreds of pages 
          of dialogue, or spend their time tuning damages, a true designer is 
          not just a level builder or script writer or gameplay balancer. Dictionary 
          definitions for design include, &quot;inventing, or making a plan for.&quot; 
          Implementation is, if anything, a byproduct of a designer’s work. Without 
          plans and invention, a modern game would get nowhere. It is far past 
          time for the industry to both improve its treatment of designers as 
          well as improving its quality of designers, but even if this doesn’t 
          happen, at least we know that we can tell industry outsiders that what 
          we do isn’t programming, it’s planning.</font></p>
        <p>&nbsp; 
        <p align="RIGHT"><i><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">- 
          Rich Wyckoff was a game designer on the recent title <b>Trespasser</b> 
          from <a href="http://www.dreamworksgames.com">Dreamworks Interactive</a>.</font></i></p>
        <p align="RIGHT">&nbsp;</p>
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    <td><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2"><b>Credits:</b> 
      Beaker's Bent logo illustrated by and is &copy; 1999 Dan Zalkus. Beaker's 
      Bent is &copy; 1999 Rich Wyckoff. All other content is &copy; 1998 <a target="_self" href="http://www.loonyboi.com">loonyboi 
      productions</a>. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't 
      do it. We have ways of making you talk.</font></i></td>
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