So a lot has happened in my game development life lately. It all started with a very nice job offer from JoWooD Productions. The Austrian Game Publisher was looking for a person to fill their “creative gap” in terms of game design. The publisher brandishes a multitude of brands, some of which have recently acquired lots of attention. However, being solely dependent on developers to come up with concepts and finished products, JoWooD more often than not found them selves under crossfire from the public for not holding delivery dates or lacking quality in their games.

Now, as you may have heard, a big trend in the games industry these days seems to be going towards smaller ‘production houses’ that incorporate production and design, while outsourcing development to smaller studios. This removes the risks of development while keeping a tight focus on the product itself.

I was hired to be part of a similar central team, and I guess it is a really interesting job opportunity. For somebody who believes in separating game design form development.

As I suddenly found myself preparing a set of games, I noticed that I could not achieve the quality in terms of vision and novelty that would be required to help the company producing those new titles.

Hence, I starting observing my working methods, and I found out some unsettling facts: I am actually not a game designer per se, as I don’t create new concepts, I merely combine existing solutions from other genres and games.

Admittedly I think I am quite skilled at analyzing working patterns and applying them to solve existing problems, but this is more a process similar to content creation: you take a given set of features and apply them to a set of problems.
Just as a level designer uses his game objects, or an artist creates a game world out of given architectural components.

Having realized this, I started asking myself “Is this how everybody does it?” - Honestly, I don’t think so. Somebody has to come up with those solutions that I so readily apply.
True that ideas are a collaborative and mainly subconscious effort of a given interest group, usually aided by outside stimuli, but still there essentially are people that come up with new solutions. These, if you think about it, are mainly designers that come from a coding background. Will Wright, John Carmack, David Braben and many more. Ok, for every coder there’s a famous game designer that came from a different background, like Miyamoto, Mizuguchi and Sakaguchi.

But the one luxury that the latter three don’t have is the option of trying out ideas themselves, they need to rely on programmers to prototype their vision. Which is OK if you have a strong idea and vision, but not at all if you’re not sure where you want to go with your interactivity.

What most designers then resort to is probably the key reason for the uneasy atmosphere that has been hanging above the whole computer and video game society for the past couple of years: the ‘copy’ or combine existing concepts. Which usually works, but mainly only on a cosmetic level.

Now I stumbled across an older entry on the problem of growing content and stagnating interaction by Raph Koster:

Raph Koster’s Moore Wall Entry

Raph shows in nice clean charts, that our development is geared towards filling out hardware, not user boundaries. But how could we if we have artists designing games and programmers merely coding them?

I hope that the indie movement, with it’s fill of too-small teams where the programmer still has to part-time fill in the role of a game designer (should read creator, actually) will harvest a breed of more design interested coders, but for me personally the next step is: step back from game design, do what I do well (combine polygons and pixels so the look nice) and shove some of the responsibility back to my fellow engineers.

Hence, I shall pause my career as game designer and get back at my roots.

P.S.: Creative collaboration between coder and artist is still a must.