This may not sound so bad, but it’s far from satisfying and can be exhausting. The team is constantly asking me questions about what the boss wants, and I have to be able to answer these confidentally; anything I don’t know for certain, I have to clarify with him. Peppering my boss with incessant questions is a pretty daunting concept, not to mention a bit impractical as he is a busy man overseeing the entire game, so isn’t always speedy with the email replies. This means I occasionally have to take a gamble and decide myself the best course of action. But I have to do this with COMPLETE CONFIDENCE, or they’re on to me in no time and they won’t act on what I say until I get it clarified… it’s ridiculous, but everyone is scared rigid of getting it wrong.

I’m not cut out for leading, at least not yet. I’ve always known this really, although it’s not an ideal way to think in regards to your own career. I’m not confident enough in my own ideas, I give in too easily and I hate the idea of having to tell people what to do, especially if they’re difficult. So a task like this is pretty much breaking me; I imagine anyone can see through me when I try to make a call on something. I have no idea if it’s right. I certainly haven’t really thought about if it’s what’s best for making the game fun – that isn’t important anymore. I’m just picking the easiest course to get it IN A BOX, because then I won’t be the one held responsible when we fall behind. And I hate thinking like that.

Every time the team suggest adding to what is in the basic design, I umm and ahh… I’m too worried about things escalating and us running out of time. Why do I care about that? It’s a producer’s job to worry about schedules, not a designer’s. I should be trying to bleed out every last drop of entertainment out of this, not just settling for what’s easy. But then there’s also the matter of it deviating from our boss’ Grand Design (TM). I don’t know what’s a bell or a whistle too far, and I don’t want to be the one held responsible for it not being what he expected.

This is just turning into something of a rant, so I apologise. But I don’t know what’s what at the moment. I’ve said before that this a job where the rules and responsibilites always change, and that’s kind of why I love it, but there are times when you have to wonder, is this really what I signed up for? Right now, I don’t really design – I’m a glorified PA. The messenger who, as we all know, is only saying what he was told to say, but will get shot anyway. It’s all the pressure of responsibility with none of the power to actually have creative input. I think that’s what stings the most.

Anyway, as always this will only be the case for a few more weeks, whereupon all the rules will change again and I’ll be doing something else. I guess you’ve got to take the good with the bad, and all that jazz. I’ll just have to grit my teeth and hope I come out the other side a little wiser… or something. On a more optimistic note, it would be interesting to hear if being a designer in other companies is anything like this – from what I’ve heard, the roles differ greatly from job to job.

Hopefully next time I ‘blog’ it’ll be with a slightly cheerier tone… but right now I’m just a wee bit knackered.

… The first of which I can tenuously tie in to what I was saying just then about things getting hectic. Since you last heard from me, I’ve seen 2 games released. After my first game just about reached its deadline last Easter (an expert in timing, I took 2 weeks of holiday when we were due to ship, expecting to come back and it be out the door… but it was still there, tenacious as ever, being bug-fixed), there was a bit of a lull while the designers from the project (myself included) geared up to jump onto another game that was being developed in tandem by a separate team within the company, due to launch later in the year. It was strange hitting such a dry patch after the frenzy of 15 hour days and lost weekends needed to get the first game out the door, as we were basically asked to familiarise ourselves with it. It wasn’t that long a period, though – before long management suddenly got wind of the fact that, hey, we don’t actually have that much time before this game needs to ship, and it’s in a bit of a state.

Enter us, newly familiarised and ready to make big lists of required changes, and go in with our scripting and editor skills from the previous game to whip this game into shape. It was only a couple of months before 15 hour days had returned, with their new friends, the days-when-you-spend-all-day-waiting-for-a-build-to-test-before-getting-it-an-hour-before-you-reach-your-daily-limit. Takeouts were consumed, facial hair was grown… I didn’t see my housemate for about a week at one point, such was my working pattern. But we got it done and out the door, even if it did seem to kick and scream every inch of the way out. 2 games on the shelves within the space of 6 months; very odd. (I’ll have to come back to what it was like seeing the fruits of our labours on the shelves another time.)

So after that, we’re all fairly knackered again. Days are short and feel weird, coming in and not really having anything to do. Coders and artists feel this transition less, as they have groundwork to do ready for the next games that we’re on course to do. We designers have our own version of that, namely some slight input on the high-end designs of these games. Mainly our boss and the higher-ups decide the fundamentals, but it was good to be involved – this was the first time I’d seen a game at the very start of development. This generally entails meetings where we’d look at the source material (oh yes, we’re back on licenses again!) and pull out relevant characters, what their abilities might be (sticking with any gameplay mechanics that have been established already), breaking it up into possible levels, etc… meetings which can be quite spaced out, leaving us in the interim to get familiar with the licenses – basically being paid to watch films and jot down ideas. Can’t really complain, but again it’s quite a shock to the system after the absolute shitstorm that is crunch time. And it makes it tricky to work a full day if your workplace does flexible hours!

After a good month or so of this, actual work tasks start to filter through. My fellow designers and I were asked by our lead which of the projects we would prefer to work on – unfortunately, some were more favourable than others for various reasons, including the licenses themselves and the teams that would be working on them etc. I personally chose to play martyr and opted for the project that most others weren’t touching with a 6 foot pole, which was a decision of dubious wisdom – but I’ll come back to that another time, as it’s a fun (cough) story. Early tasks for me included cobbling together lists of the characters, explaining their attributes within the game so that the team would have it for reference, that sort of thing… and then we’re pretty much back into writing level design documents. I can’t remember if I ever touched on this previously, but the document writing stage of design is so different in pace to the later implementation stage that it kinda feels like two separate jobs…

Which I suppose is my rather long-winded point. In a way I suppose it’s like how, say, a craft shop in a tourist town would probably see only one socks-and-sandal-camera-round-the-neck weirdo in the winter, but have to cope with an entire flock of the bastards during the summer months. No doubt lots of jobs have their busy periods and their quieter times. But to me, it seems as though while with the craft shop it’s just a case of the same thing but at different speeds, busy periods as a games designer doesn’t just involve churning out design documents at a mile a minute (which, by the way, can be either really easy or impossible – another topic I want to explore in full later). You have to be constantly ready to drop everything you knew and switch your routine, and not just swapping from ‘lethargic document writer mode’ to ‘turbo implementation Nazi mode’. Some days you’ll be asked to become QA for a day, Stars in their Eyes style, blitzing through the game so far and chasing up everything that appears wrong for whatever reason (usually looming milestones or shows requiring the game to be in a largely crash-free state). Others you become the sound effect bitch. I’m too lazy to find an analogy – something about football strategies, maybe…

And it can be tricky to adjust, especially to what I personally find the hardest change, which is going back to the plodding research and document writing after a mad flurry of implementation – i.e. when a game is finished. I can find it maddening when I don’t have practical tasks to be doing, and I have to go back to regular old thinking again. Or just watching a film for research, when you’re brain keeps telling you ‘this can’t be work, it’s too easy’ and distracts you from actually taking anything in.

So, downtime. It’s pretty boring, but it’s part of the job and pretty soon it becomes routine again. And then some bastard blows the whistle and all hell breaks loose again…

So it’s almost 2008 and one of my new year’s resolutions is to try and adopt a more positive outlook. It won’t last, but they never do. But I honestly do love being a games designer. I love the design process, bouncing ideas off my fellow designers, getting their input, offering my own opinions about their ideas, slagging off programmers for kicks… One thing I took away from uni was a quote from my design tutor that ‘if you enjoy your job you’ll never work a day in your life’. It’s true of this – I love computer games, and now I get to help make them. Even if the game we’re working on isn’t something I would normally choose to play, it doesn’t matter, I can still do my part to make it something I wouldn’t throw out the window if I HAD to play it. Like if I had a gun to my head. But then I suppose the gunman wouldn’t really let me throw it out the window. But anyway, that challenge to make something that has every risk of becoming turgid and mediocre into something more than that is what keeps me, and I reckon most of my colleagues, going. The odds are against us – nobody expects a licensed game to be that good; even the more open-minded gamer isn’t going to expect 10/10 greatness from us. But since I started I’ve wanted to take everything I’ve learnt from playing games most of my life and use it to help our game be considerate to the player and fun to play.

It’s that weird thrill you get as well when you see one of the levels you’ve designed become fully functioning in good ol’ 3D. I didn’t get that until a few weeks ago because I was working on levels designed by my colleagues… but eventually my own designs were becoming realised, and it’s the weirdest thing. Sure, a lot of things were chopped and changed (I think I moaned about that in one of my previous blogs), but the essence of what I created was there for all to see. And potentially thousands, maybe millions I guess, will see it as well. It’s mind blowing, and gives you that added incentive to try and make it great. I’ll be the first to admit my designs are a bit basic, a combination of the limitations stressed to me while I was designing and the fact I still have stuff to learn about making a truly great level with limited resources… but I worked hands-on with one of my levels and having played it through I think it’s harmless fun… nothing too taxing or mind-blowing, but basic fun. There’s still a few months to make it better of course.

Working hands-on with the team isn’t something I thought I’d enjoy, but it’s amazing how quickly you can replace shyness with confidence when you’re thrown into a situation. I’m still not the world’s most outgoing bastard, but having mingled with the artists and programmers for several weeks I’ve started to find a certain confidence which really is crucial for a designer (the actual designing process can be quite solitary if you want it to be, but when the stuff is actually getting made you don’t have much of a choice but to go and talk to the people making it to make sure they understand it and such). I’m trying my best to be the ‘agreeable designer’ who doesn’t storm over and make demands, but whereas before some of them would see I was new to this and walk all over me, now I’m a little better at telling them to do what they’re told. Sort of. And if they don’t, that’s what the boss is for… Really though I just enjoy going over to programmers and artists and pledging my case, saying ‘well this could do with being a little more like this, if that’s okay’ and trying to stay on their good sides. And I think they appreciate that; I seem to have some sort of trust thing going now with most of them. And it is actually sometimes genuinely interesting to find out why something won’t work the way you want it to, so then the design crowbar comes in to try and make something else fit in its place. Trust me, it’s fun.

Throw in the odd goody bag from publishers and the always-entertaining office spamming that goes on and you have a job I really wouldn’t trade for the world. God knows I probably won’t be saying that in a few weeks; we reached alpha (just about), but beta (the next stage, though I’m not sure what the standards are for this one) promises to be just as fun and is only a couple of months away. But I’m genuinely looking forward to the rush, because that’s personally when I’m in my element and although it’s exhausting and stressful it’s also the point where you realise that despite everything you’re still having the ball. Something is definitely right when you barely notice you’ve just worked 13 hours without lunch.

Anyway… Happy New Year and all that folks!

Saturday: Not a bad turnout, I turn up early afternoons (hey, I’m not mad on mornings either) and my friendly neighbourhood programmers are in tact. Great stuff. Eight hours later, we’ve got one level in the bag (just about), so we’re pretty chuffed. Right, time for bed, seeya again tomorrow, right gang?

Sunday: Show up mid-afternoon (I’m HAVING some sort of weekend, damnit) to a practically empty office. None of the programmers I needed have shown up. Without them, I’m pretty much useless, apart from doing my rubbishy little designer jobs that take about two seconds (placing collectibles and setting up AI paths in the editor, for example, and going through the fixlist to see what’s been done – in this case, jack shit). Trains aren’t great so I’m stuck in the office for three hours messing around with our physics engine. Can’t say I’m too impressed.

I was hoping to write a more optimistic blog this time around because I know I’ve been a miserable git so far (I’ve got one brewing – coming up next, some GOOD things about being a games designer!), but I couldn’t help but feel a little let down today. I guess it goes without saying that as a team we’re pretty much dependent on each other… maybe designers more so than others cos to generalise a lot of the time we’re just checking the work of artists and programmers to make sure everything’s as it should be. Without them we can’t really do much that can’t be done in the editor (cos, y’know, that technical jazz isn’t our area). I guess in a way we’re sort of like glorified QA at the moment – and without anything to test we’re in a bit of a dry patch really.

So yeah, today… not good. Tomorrow hopefully there’ll be some spankings administered (perhaps not literally, mind), because these particular individuals kinda let us down (it wasn’t just me, various others had come in and been able to do very little as a result). We’re all trying to get this game to alpha and it just isn’t happening if we don’t cooperate with each other. I know this sounds preachy and obvious and yadda yadda, but it’s the bloody truth. It just means tomorrow we’re all going to be in a flap because the stuff that we’d intended to do yesterday is still on the list.

Eh, never mind. I’m going to go to bed and go over the reasons I do genuinely love this job, despite everything! Hopefully I can jot some down for you for next time. Unless something bad happens; then you’re getting another rant. That’s just how it goes I’m afraid!

I took a couple of days off from work last week for family adventures. I mentioned before that we’re coming up to our alpha deadline, so the timing wasn’t exactly great, but when duty calls and all that. So yes, I had a four day weekend the likes of which I hadn’t seen since uni. I come back in on Monday, raring to go (actually bloody knackered; my family exhaust me) and check my inbox. In my absence, one of my levels was worked on. Fair enough; I don’t expect the world to stand still while I’m gone. But the scale of which the level had been changed from my initial design was pretty… profound. I barely recognised it.

Basically it had been chopped and changed until pretty much anything that had set it apart as being unique to the other levels was absent. Elements around which the entire level revolved had been replaced with existing mechanics to make it easier to make. My lead explained all these changes to me, and I nodded along, and in all fairness, he was totally right to make the changes; we’re on a deadline, and this way it’ll take less time. But nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel a little something in me sink. After all, it isn’t the first time this has happened. Many of the ideas I originally had in my designs have been stripped down to more basic forms – often right down to blatantly generic and imagination-free.

It’s a frustrating thing about being a designer, but a lot of the time you feel like you’re fighting a losing battle trying to come up with inventive ideas. It often feels like the entire team is conspiring against you to ensure that of all your ideas, only the ones that are easy to implement and similar to what they know will see the light of day. It’s like trying to stuff a tree through a key hole, or something – all that’s gonna come through are a few scraps of bark and maybe a twig or two (rubbish analogy maybe, but I wanted to get one in here somewhere). The worst thing is that half of the time I can see where everyone else is coming from… “Yes, this idea was a bit far-fetched…”, “I didn’t realise how much extra effort this would take…”, “Yes, I guess we could tone this down a little…”, “I guess this ISN’T THAT crucial, but it would be nice…” And so on.

Then again, they can all fuck off, because at the risk of sounding like a diva, it’s their JOB to make what we design! But then it’s also our job to tailor our designs to what’s actually conceivable when things are looking tight… something one of my co-workers refers to as ‘the design crowbar’. A fair bit of the time the ammendments I’m making are because I’ve not fully understood how the game would actually be made – this is something I’m realising a lot now. But, I don’t know, it often feels like people would just rather not try and put the effort in or something. I’ve said myself that this is a licensed game so okay, it’s never going to be great, but at this rate it’s never going to be anything but the same mechanics repeated over and over again until the player dies of boredom.

Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away. There are some neat ideas in this game. But there could be so much more if only every time something that presented a challenge came up it wasn’t cropped straight out of the designs! It’s starting to feel like a sin to think up something that could be potentially difficult to implement. I’ve had dirty looks from coders, animators and artists alike in the last few weeks when I’ve explained how something works in my level. Half the time, a few days later said something has been axed in favour of ‘generic mechanic A’.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all doom and gloom. That crucial other half of the team actually seems enthusiastic about these ideas. It just often feels that, like I said earlier, it’s a losing fight. Somewhere along the line somebody is going to complain that they don’t have the time or the resources. Half the time it’s a case of standing your ground, because some of these bastards walk all over you if you don’t have the confidence to back up your ideas (something I’m trying to get gradually as I go along!); often they’ll be able to do what you want, but they just won’t want to.

Apologies for a rather downbeat entry, it’s been one of those days – bugs and crashes aplenty, and little in the way of progress. But I know we’re getting there… even if at the end of the tunnel or whatever half of what I wrote in my design documents is going to have been left on the cutting room floor.

Our Alpha deadline is fast approaching. I didn’t even know what this meant until recently, but now I know that to get the game to an alpha standard it needs to be in a basic functioning state that can be played from start to finish, even certain levels are graphically incomplete or some puzzles are simplified and so on. This is what we need to do for our game – bring all the levels to alpha standard. Currently we’re about 25% of the way there. The deadline’s before Christmas. I’m shitting it a bit!

Things have changed quite a bit since I last wrote on this. For a start, I’m not writing design documents any more; they’re all finished now. That was the point where all this alpha madness began, and it felt like I was starting a new job all over again. My duties quickly switched from ‘write design documents and do a few pictures to support them’ to ‘help the coders make the fucking game already’. The design team was given ownership over certain levels and asked to chase their status up with the rest of the development team. Lots of talking to coders, artists and so on. Learning to use the in-house editor, which can only be described as evil incarnate, contrived to be as unhelpful as can be (I’m told this is a staple tradition of all game editors).

So yeah, I’m the appointed designer on a number of our levels (for now). I don’t like to say ‘in charge’ or whatever, but in a way I sort of am… in that I’m the one who nags everyone else involved in my levels. “Why isn’t this done, can you get this working, when will this be ready…?” It’s kinda intimidating, because I’m still only 3 months into this job and they know as well as I do that I really don’t fully know what I’m doing yet. I’m trying my best to make it clear that I don’t want to tell anyone how to do their job, I’m just doing my own when I say that something just isn’t working. One or two people like to take advantage; I’ve been set by one of the programmers to do half their job in the level editor on one of the levels. This is a good thing in a way, as it means I’ve gotten to grips with it fairly quickly. It’s also not that great because the job’d probably get done much faster if people who already knew what they were doing were doing it; simple things are fine but not every-bloody-thing. Lucky for me the producer is looking out for me though, making sure I don’t quickly become the code team’s bitch.

My boss apologised in advance for this baptism of fire, but people are right when they say it’s the best way to learn. I’ve gotten to know nearly all the team in these last two weeks, I’ve gained a basic understanding of our editor and how the game actually gets made… It’s all good. And being busy is better than being bored. It’ll be interesting to see how things go over these next few weeks. I’m a little apprehensive about it, but it’s exciting too. It’s really like being in a different job though… I’ve been yanked out of my comfortable little Word doc writing ways and into the real world. Now I’ve just got to grit my teeth and hope I don’t cock it up.

But yeah, basically I was saying I think everybody comes into this industry (as a designer, at least) hoping to create the new and wonderful ideas that future generations of gamers will be viewing with the same reverence afforded to Mario 64 (everybody knows that was a big innovator, right? I mean personally I didn’t like it much, but then I’d already played Banjo-Kazooie before I got to play Mario and I thought that was way better… Sorry! But Nintendo pretty much INVENTED the 3D platformer with Mario 64, so obviously it’s a key example of the whole new and wonderful thing I was yakking about).

I wanted to go into the industry to make RPGs. There’s a few problems with this plan. Firstly, I’m talking JRPGs (Japanese RPGs) which, funnily enough, are largely made in Japan. (Western RPGs make me want to crawl into an oven soaked in gasoline. Too many orcs and goblins) So not much chance of that happening for me without learning the language and shipping off to the East. Secondly, JRPGs are hardly the hallmark of great games design; they rob ideas off each other shamelessly, and are generally only distinguishable in their combat systems. I love the genre to bits, but I’m being realistic – usually the game itself is a bit basic (outside of fighting), which is made up for (ideally) in good characterisation and plot. Like in the amazing Skies of Arcadia (below).

Anyway, the point of this is that I wasn’t coming into the industry expecting to be an innovator. I have mixed feelings about this attitude, mind. I’m of the belief that not everything can be original, and that some things are perfectly acceptable being an old idea that is just done well in a new way. Still, a games designer should really have something new to bring to the table. Even now, I don’t think that’s me. I prefer to take bits from other games I’ve enjoyed and try and implement them into my own designs as well as I can, mixing things up to effectively create something new. Like taking a whole load of pick ‘n’ mix and stuffing it all in your mouth at once. Or something. It felt like an analogy moment.

Even so, when I was asked to create my first level design document, I had plenty of ideas. Perhaps nothing massively original, but I had quite a lot of them, and I went to town. I was pretty excited. After a few days of knocking together my ideas into a coherent whole, I showed it to my fellow designers. They took a look at it, and, dead nicely, suggested where I should chop and change things. After all, I’d just started, so I wasn’t 100% on how the game worked, so some of the things I’d implemented went against our design document or weren’t doable in other ways and so on. Shockingly to me, one of my main ideas was too ambitious. I went away and made the changes, then resubmitted it for judgement. I’d done a few things wrong again, and some of it was still a bit too complex, would I mind rejigging this so it was a bit simpler? No problem. I went back and did it again. This repeated for about a week before we were all happy with it. My design barely resembled my original idea. It had been stripped down to the most basic bones of what I originally had in mind.

Just so you know, I’m really not typing this with bitterness or anything like that. I’m perfectly fine with that level the way it is. It’s just strange how what I conceived as a simple idea to start with was made into something that really, had I started with that in mind, would have taken about 2 minutes to write up, and probably less to play through. The obvious fact is, ambitious ideas take more work to implement, and it’s just easier to keep things simple. Much of the game had been designed already when I joined the company, so really all I was being asked to do was familiarise myself with existing elements and reuse them in different ways. While that may sound like a lazy bastard’s recycling dream, it actually takes a bit of effort to shrink your idea into something doable. And really, as a designer, you have to design something that can be feasibly made or there’s really no point in designing it at all.

So since then I lowered my bar a little and kept things simple. I’m always worrying that perhaps I keep things TOO simple now, but recently when I show my designs to my colleagues there’s fewer revisions to be made. There are times when I wonder if I’m sacrificing my artistic integrity and all that jazz for an easier ride – it’d take more effort to argue my point about a more complicated idea that I was adamant would work better, and I could piss the peers off, etc – but I guess I won’t be able to see how valid that worry is until the levels are made and I can play through them. If they’re so basic and dull I fall asleep – or worse, they remind me of a Silent Hill level – maybe I’ll have to raise the bar a little more again. But then, that’s what redesigns are for, I guess.

We’re working on a licensed game. Most people with an ounce of gaming knowledge will generally run for the hills at the very mention of the term ‘licensed game’, whether it’s preceded by ‘film’, ‘cartoon’ or whatever. Licensed = ripped-off, badly implemented ideas, tedious and unimaginative levels… general badness. Right? Usually. I personally found Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom a guilty pleasure. No, hear me out. Sure it didn’t do anything new, but it was a solid platformer that had been made by people with obvious enthusiasm for the franchise; it was basically like playing through an episode of the cartoon, which is all its target audience can really want. And I love Spongebob, so a solid platform game with decent Spongebob jokes is fine in my books. So there you go. Plus, tongue surfing.

But I digress. Licenses don’t just elicit cries of despair from weary gamers, but also the developers commissioned to make them. After all, we’ve been given this game by the publisher. And it’s a pretty rubbish license. But it’s our job to be enthusiastic about it and create a decent game from the material, and from what I’ve seen this is one of the toughest things to do.

Before I joined, some of the team had worked on another licensed ‘gem’ before coming to this one. Meddling publishers made last-minute demands and changes that apparently fucked development right up, royally. They knew they’d made a below par game, and the name of the license is still a dirty word in the office. It’s a weird thing to come into, but I can’t imagine (yet) what it’s like; these people work insane hours, and poured so many evenings and weekends into this title that they knew some time before it was finished wouldn’t be any good. Sure they got paid their overtime, but even then, it’s never fun to feel like you’ve wasted your time.

So now they’ve been burned and seem to look at this new license with disdain. So far the publishers seem to have been fairly happy with us (from what I’ve seen, anyway), but who knows when they could start sticking their oar in and messing things up? But from what I gather this is a general problem for games developers, regardless of whether the game is a license or not. If there’s an external publisher, they call the shots, and that can mean hell for us. Apparently. I’m just relaying what I’ve been told.

What I CAN say for certain though is one curse of the license, which may be on a smaller scale but, if you ask me, still has an effect. Everybody thinks the license we’re working on is shit. It’s a kid’s thing, for a start. And I agree. I bloody hate it. But when, as I’ve said before, it’s your job to be enthusiastic about it and make a good game of it, it’s made tougher when no one around you is making an effort to disguise their contempt. Fair enough, we’d all rather be working on something else. But personally, I can put my mind to trying to make the best of it and keeping my personal hatred for the damn thing to myself. It makes a cheerier work environment. Being reminded constantly how bent your project is just makes it feel pointless. Like, “oh sod it, nobody cares how it’ll play as long as all the characters are there and we use some original clips and soundbites”. I can only assume this was the design philosophy behind every Simpsons game ever created, among others.

We’ve got a good few months to go on this. It’s not a serious issue, but I hope that this sort of negativity will fall by the wayside when everyone starts getting busier, just ‘cos then I’ll forget that I’m making something that I personally wouldn’t touch with a six-inch pole if it’d been made by anyone else.

Thinking about it, it sort of makes me look at all licenses in a new light. Sure, they’re generally little more than cash cows, but somebody had to make them, and chances are it wasn’t the person who decided that said license would be a good little money tree. They’ll have just sat in their cushy publisher chair and given the work to an unsuspecting developer who leapt at the chance to make some money in what is – and even I know this – a pretty vicious industry for anything that isn’t a brand.

I’ve decided. I know it’s not entirely up to me, but I’m going to do what I can to make our licensed game something that won’t just sell well and look pretty in the box next to the accompanying DVD, but will actually give the poor sap a good few hours of entertainment. It’s never going to be Mario 64, but if it can be another Battle for Bikini Bottom then I’ll be perfectly happy.

Welcome to my first and only proper blog thing, where I’m going to spew my ramblings about working in the computer games industry. This is largely because I’m bored, and also because I thought it’d be a good way of keeping track of where I went wrong should I ever get fired. As well as that, there’s a slight chance that some unsuspecting potential games designer in-the-making could stumble upon it via the wonders of Google and benefit from a bit of insider info from someone who is admittedly naive and largely pretty ignorant about the industry, despite it being their dream of several years to land a job in it.

So to start off, here’s a bit of background about how I went from uni to getting my job. Sorry it’s a bit long.

A few months ago, I was the one googling for any tidbits of info I could get on exactly what a games designer does, and the best way to get into the industry. Considering I was in the third year of a Computer Games Design degree, it seems odd that I would still not know, but the truth is I really didn’t. Not a clue. I handed in a Games Design document for my dissertation that already makes me yak at how lacking it was now that I’ve worked in a games company for two months and seen how things are really done. At the time I thought it was pretty good. It was only when I gave a presentation on it that I really understood that it was little more than a concept pamphlet, by which point it was really too late. I wasn’t the most diligent student but I went to enough lectures to think I should have known what I was doing by this point. The only reason my document was even as good as it was (I got a 2:2) was because it was made to fit into the excellent design document template created by Doom designer Chris Taylor. Without that I’d have been completely lost.

I don’t necessarily want to get into a massive rant about the failings of my university, which I won’t name – as with the company and project I’m involved in and so on – in case anybody really does read this and I get spanked. I do love ranting. But for now I’m just going to concede that the course wasn’t great, but then I wasn’t the best student either; I tended to think I knew best and skipped more than I should have. The only thing I really learned from my 3 years of uni was that when you work for a games company they really DO stuff you with junk food. But only if you put the hours in. And my Games Design tutor did show us the Chris Taylor template. But everything else just felt pointless. Maybe if I’d had 100% attendance I would have been an expert on everything games industry-related when I left, but I seriously doubt it. I’ll probably rant more about that at a later date, though.

A brief summary of the events that led to me getting a job. I still believe much of it was luck, but I guess that’s true of landing a career in any industry you care to mention. I left uni semi-confident that I’d done okay… ish. I’d done a module to make a CV and portfolio so I had that ready to throw into the world, which I did. My friend found me a nice big list of all the games companies in the country (found here) and I emailed all of them that weren’t either a) designers for mobile phone games (snobbishness on my part, but I fucking hate those games. Except Johnny Crash Does Texas; that one’s class) b) MMORPG designers. I always checked the jobs sections of their sites first but rarely were there any design positions going, so I just emailed them speculatively. Recruitment websites such as Datascope were largely hopeless as far as I was concerned; every position seemed to require experience. Getting a foot in the door is definitely not easy.

This might be a good time to mention I also tried the Job Centre – I was signing on for the dole anyway so I thought if they were going to get me a job they could try and find me something I actually wanted instead of part time waiter work like they seemed determined I was going to do. My advice to anyone reading this is DON’T BOTHER. They can’t help you! The lady put ‘games designer’ in her computer and it almost melted. The industry is still growing up and the processes of getting into it are still changing (uni courses are only a few years old), and it seems they haven’t branched out to the job centre stage yet. So basically while they tried to get me something washing dishes in the Rusty Spoon to stop me scrounging off the government, I had to get off my own arse and bother games companies.

My emails consisted of the same formula of:

1. Dear Sir/Madam, you got any jobs?
2. This is me, this what I do, I’m totally great.
3. I’d love to work for your company, you guys are, like, sooo awesome cool.
4. This is my CV, this is my portfolio, please look. I’d LOVE to work for you.
5. Yours, me.

Lots of copy-and-pasting, changing the names around, adding a few bits when I genuinely DID admire some of their work. A lot of companies did get back to me quickly to let me down – some even wrote a REAL LETTER (WOW!) – others were a bit slower or didn’t bother at all. Same as any industry really. I got an interview offer from one company which I got really excited about, until I realised that it was for a Lead Tester position. Now, I’d written on my emails that I was interested in design work and possibly testing positions, but I’d also mentioned I was fresh out of uni and had no experience. So yeah, that was kinda no good to me, and I decided to save myself the trip.

Things were getting a bit bleak, when a friend of my brother’s, who works for the company I now work for myself (you can tell where this story’s going, right?) mentioned to him that design jobs were going. This was a rarity in itself. I practically broke my laptop in two ripping it open to get online and apply. I sent my CV and the usual covering letter, checked up on the games they’d made and added a few kind words about them (buttering them up never hurts, does it? Though you do look at yourself in the mirror later and hate yourself a little). A little while later, I heard back with the offer of an interview. I nearly had a stroke. My brother’s friend fed me tidbits of info on what the designer who would be interviewing me would be looking for, what his design philosophies were and what he’d worked on and so on. This was quite a help, and definitely where some of that ‘luck’ comes in. I grabbed hold of demos of the games and did my ‘research’, shit my pants a few times, and then it was time for the interview.

I hate job interviews, but this one went extremely well, I thought. I’m hopeless at selling myself but when I was asked questions I gave my answers as much enthusiasm as I could muster and just tried to stress my passion for games best I could. It wasn’t quite as forced as that, really… I actually felt very relaxed. It just seemed like a casual chat about games really. The fact that it was one-on-one was a big help; no doubt I’d have shit myself and died if it’d been a panel. But anyway… It probably wasn’t great that when asked what my salary expectations were I replied ‘anything’ – way to establish your own self-worth! Other than that I came out of there feeling pretty confident, having been told that I was a sure thing so long as nobody better came along. I guess that always goes without saying but it seemed nice to hear.

I didn’t get it. I was crushed.

Tiddy-boom.

So then my job hunt continued. I’d had my first taste of real post-interview rejection so I felt I’d matured a little (once I finished bawling, of course). I sent a nice ‘I understand’ email back to the chap who’d let me down, just to keep things friendly in case something came up. And a few weeks later, something did – I got a phone call from the company. I actually thought it was my friend, who was very late to meet me in town at the time, calling from her boyfriend’s mobile, so I answered the phone a little more haughtily than is usually recommended to someone about to offer you a job. I had another stroke. Another design position had become available on a different project. I paced back and forth in the doorway of an art supply shop while I was told what salary to expect and so on. I accepted, but he said he’d have to send the written offer and I’d have to officially accept that before it’d be in stone. I did just that, accepted over again, and said I’d start in a week to allow myself time to find a place to live. I would have asked for more time but I really didn’t like to keep them hanging and push my luck. So yes, I had a job. The fact that on the letter they sent me they’d put someone else’s name on the top (who, it turned out, had been the one to get the job I actually was interviewed for) was only a slight blemish on the good news.

So that’s how I ended up working for a games company. I’ve been there two months, and it’s been a real learning experience, but to be honest you deserve a prize if you’ve read this far without falling asleep so I’ll call it a day for now. I think looking back there’s nothing I can really suggest or advise in regards to getting a job… You’ve just got to keep trying and wait until you catch a break, I suppose. Hardly the most insightful pearls of wisdom, but it’s all I’ve got right now!

Until next time!