69 ways to become a better game designer
While the Devil must be given his due, he cannot take all the credit for all the insightful methods by which an aspiring game designer may enrich his or her knowledge, creativity, and--most importantly--career. No, the Devil did not directly concoct the majority of the following tips that are well-proven, indeed, timeless techniques for boosting any professional designer. The credit for the bulk of these tips goes out to the designers who have already put them into practice and gained their due fortune and name recognition. Behind the great names of game design, lie techniques and tactics that got them where they are today.
-- The Devil's Ludographer
The Tips
From preparation, to postproduction, here are 69 ways to become a better game designer. Learn them; live them!
Preparation
- Grow a goatee
Or a beard.
- Speak in a deep, authoritative voice
Nothing says conviction, dedication, and vision like a gravel-ridden voice.
- Gain a few pounds
It'll add weight to your opinions.
- Wear glasses
They made Matthew Broderick look smarter in Godzilla.
- Hone illegible handwriting
Nothing says mad genius like illegible scribbling. The more ambiguous the mark, the more leeway you have to make it the right mark.
- Go to school
It doesn't matter what you study (or if you study), but attend a prestigious institution.
- Learn the vocabulary of programmers and artists
And throw it back at anyone foolish enough to disagree with you, like a hitman with a Tommy gun.
- Practice illustration
Nothing says "fun gameplay" like a sharp diagram or a hasty sketch, with flare.
- Keep a notebook
With lots of notes and lots more doodles. Doodles are the seed of brilliant design.
- Play games, lots of games, the harder the better
Only hardcore gamers have the prerequisite experience and sophistication to conceive great games. And brag about playing skill. Brag about how bad you are. If you can't play well, how can you be expected to design well? Your playing skill as Quake III champion should be bulleted as a primary qualification on your resume.
- Read
Read voraciously on every topic imaginable to humankind. There are only two topics not worth a designer's time: software engineering and product development.
- Practice job interviewing
A job is only a means to bigger interview.
- Join the biggest company you can
The world wants you. But you can't reach the world with anything less than the biggest company. And besides your epic designs need the newest hardware and biggest budgets. Nothing else will do. Besides, how can you become a better designer without working on a bigger game?
Preproduction
- Epic
Think epic. Sell epic. No less than terrabytes of art assets are next gen. Don't skimp. You deserve it.
- Get a budget
Always get a budget. Big. As epic as the design. Get it. Never shoot until you're carrying big guns.
- Mix genres
And art styles and play styles. The more novel, the better. Of course a horror-shooter-dancer is brilliant. That's why YOU are the designer. Duh!
- Make it hard
Nothing says masterwork like a hard game. Start hard and stay hard.
- Sell the game before you make it
Even better, sell the game, and let the developers make it. You're a designer not a plebian developer.
- Write the story yourself
No one can argue ownership of the story that you wrote. And then enforce the story ... at ALL costs. No level, no character, no architectural embellishment may conflict with the Story.
- Plan
Write a design document and plan. Plan the color the hero's hair, the height of his weapons. The specs on enemies, down to shoe size. Plan the color scheme for design docs. Don't start until the plan is complete and approved (by you of course).
- Do it on paper
Production is expensive, so be sure to get it all on paper first. Keep it there until the programmers and artists have been convinced of the light thereon. Then click the Produce button.
- Choose the right Word
Make sure no word document is under a megabyte. Ever. if necessary paste in larger resolution bitmap images.
- Bulletpoint everything
Everything. In bold.
- Write pseudocode
Pseudocode displays that you are consumate in your design, from the grand vision to technical details. The best pseudocode contains passages like:
Until game is over:
Do AI.
Do UI.
Challenge the player.
- Make slideshows and charts
Lots of charts. Always print them in full color on glossy paper. Decorate studio desks like they were fine prints by a rising artist; no lesser comparison is apt for your talent.
On your slideshow, include novel technologies as bullet items on the USPs. Sell the game. Where you listening? SELL THE GAME! It's going to morph emotional metaballs that ooze pro-pixel diffuse leatherization on screen.
- Invent buzz words
Who can argue with an idiom you created? You can evolve the terminology's definition to suit your needs. Programmers rely on hard-coded "meanings;" whereas great designers use words as malleable means to an end.
- Give your concepts a snazzy title
Take common sense ideas and give them a clever title, clearly attributable to you.
- Argue against common sense
Until you're ready to give the sensible proposal a snazzy title.
- Hold design seances
Err ... meetings. Lots of meetings. Meetings make the Sun go round the Earth. During the meeting, ensure you remain in contact with the spirits of design, and be their faithful conduit to the laity.
- Stare off into space for a second before making a reply
Extra points if you glance at your conversation partner as if he or she were ignorant, incompetent, or both.
- Dismiss your juniors
Never accept their ideas until at least 2 weeks later, when your seniors have forgotten who came up with the idea.
- Categorically correct
Be categorical. Outlaw modes and domains of design categorically. No numbers, because numbers are for geeky losers; not consumers of fine interactive art.
- Impose arbitrary constraints
No chickens in level 4, because players hate out of context chickens. Duh!
- Be outspoken
Have an opinion and fight to the death over the opinion. Don't let a finger hit the keyboard until everyone agrees with you on how the marshmellow power-ups in the Easter Egg will be implemented.
- Polish, polish, polish!
Make sure the cinematics are picture perfect, the dialogue is recorded, and the prerendered scenes are complete before prototyping gameplay.
Production
- Use only the best
Acquire the most popular license, and the best talent. Accept only the highest production values. Aim for full orchestra music, the fastest renderers, the most sophisticated AI, the most gorgeous eyeball shaders. Because with you at the helm, success is assured.
- Build tools first
The best tools are the ones that are highly usable. Refuse to use any tool without a WIMP interface and robust error checking. Anybody knows that all designer errors are ultimately tools programmer errors.
- Get more RAM
Don't those tech heads get it? You need to run applications, not have applications run you. Run no less than 10 at once and get the tech heads to remember: your RAM is more important than rendering. Your primary deliverable is ideas, and your chief bottleneck is RAM.
- Never write code
Code can only do one of two things: work or not work. And a coder can only do one of two things: agree with you or disagree. Since you already agree with yourself it would be redundant for you to be a coder. Besides it would rob a team member from a valuable relationship with you.
- Play a game
And play it some more. Play the most obscure games possible. When someone disagrees with your health meter, bring up Dungeons of Daggorath as an example. When someone disagrees with your combat interface, bring up Mail Order Monster. Or with your job selection, bring up Everway. With your platformer level, bring up Montezuma's Revenge. Eventually you'll get one that the benighted subject hasn't played and then you can dismiss them with a pitying glance.
- Rise through the ranks
Get out of the level designer hot seat as fast as you can. Get to game designer quickly, or even better Creative Director. No even better: Chief Creative Officer. Like a salmon swimming upstream, leap into preproduction as soon as possible; avoid the downstream pollution of production. Send the downstream developer guppies your effusing inspirational Word documents.
- Enlist subordinates
Nothing is more essential to growing as a designer than to have hard-working but unimaginative subordinates. The best kind are ones that seem hard working and imaginative. With these you can later disprove their imagination, until they properly fork over credit to you as the source of all new, accepted ideas.
- Delegate
Delegate minor details like the definition of the amazing new technologies to junior designers. They need to feel included in the process.
Hand off your high concept designs to junior designers to implement. A great designer has more great ideas than time to implement. Hand off to promising junior designers who are in need of guidance but technically proficient. Never get stuck carrying a project from conception to production. Production is for associate producers, not designers.
- Always remember that nobody is perfect
And never let your subordinates forget it.
- Direct in person
But never commit or otherwise leave a paper trail back to your direction. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minions.
- Enforce the story at all costs
At ALL costs.
- Be specific
But only after you've seen the output of your previous, vague request. Artists love to read minds. They like it even more when you play mind games with them.
- Couch everything between high impact verbs
This boss battle could use more hot crisis action.
- Refuse to comment on anything but production values
until the game is nearly done, and then get the design changed. Who could possibly have time to comment on control mapping or environment modeling when placeholder particle systems on the fountain are two hours behind the modelers' latest?
- Request a change and then request a change back
There is no better way to maintain directorial prerogative than to be arbitrary. Should the interface include a bondo meter? Should the black dragon bone assembly puzzle have a tutorial? Once you've decided your true answer, reverse it when making the first request. Every developer loves such a logic puzzle: He told me to make it blue, which means he really wants it red, unless he thought I would think that in which case he really will want it blue...
- Judge quality objectively
The proper metric for an iteration on any aspect of design is how closely the result matches your idea. If, upon review, a developer reminds you what your best idea was, even better. Reward this astute designer with no further request for change.
- Redesign
A good design is never complete until the basics of the environment, stages, and structure have been implemented and then redesigned. Repeat this process until everyone agrees with your opinion.
- Make a clear distinction between tasteful and untasteful
As with any distinction, be objective and consistent: Your taste should be the metric to judge by. Be consistent; make no exceptions. Not all efforts to entertain are created equally; those that come closer to satisfying your sophisticated tastes are worth refining. Everything else should be scrapped. The more times a feature or asset is scrapped the more emphatically the developer learns.
- Screen playtesters
Evaluate their qualifications to comment on your masterpiece.
- Save the best for the sequel
Reserve the best ideas (especially those you borrowed) for the sequel to your upcoming hit. Let nothing ubercool be implemented until the sequel. (And get first option to work on the sequel..)
- Travel
The less you actually appear in the development studio, the better.
Public Relations
- Have a great idea
And say it's covered by your NDA. Sorry can't talk about that.
- Interview the press
Be the single point of contact to the public.
Remember these keywords and you'll have a drooling media mate:
- "Don't know" is pronounced "See-Kret".
- "Haven't decided" is pronounced "Can't reveal at this time".
- "We're hoping you'd tell us" is pronounced "Expect more news on this soon".
- "O crap, I should be taking notes!" is pronounced "That hasn't been fleshed out".
- Always post on the forums
Always read the forums. Befriend the community leaders and get your name firmly entrenched in everyone's mind. Think of them as your base. Feed them what they want to hear without concrete promises.
- Practice debate
Speak eloquently and profusely. Conjure poetic allusions and make authoritative arguments based on sound premises (no extra points for relevance). During your debate, if all else fails, invoke the human condition.
- Give talks
On design, or a book report on your favorite new book. The topic is not important; the free pass and after-talk schmoozing on why [games/developers] [are/are not] [dead/ art/visionary/rote]. Use these talks to vet which ideas are impractical yet dreamy enough for the public to swallow as innovative.
- Collect other people's ideas
Always give credit where credit is due, which is to those who agree with you. And for those that don't agree with you, at least acknowledge their inferior scope as some more technical and mechanical subdivision under your domain of Design, or even better, your domain of Creativity.
- Make it clique
Praise your supporters, throw them a bone. Ignore your detractors, or better, refer to their work out of context, and make offhand remarks about their philosophical points of view.
- Socialize, network
Grab your next great project before this one is on the shelf (or in the can).
- Never ever miss a conference
Ever. Always book yourself with bigwigs in the industry. All great people are busy; so be busy, too busy for the little people.
- Drop names
The bigger the better. Make anyone who has to argue with you argue with John Romero, Hideo Kojima, and Shigeru Miyamoto.
- Consider changing your name
If it doesn't have that ring, who'll sing your praises?
- Espouse the dilemma of the designer
Publicly and loudly. Talk about what is wrong with the industry. Bemoan the lack of originality. Declare revolution and promote innovation. Elevate games to an art form, and debate fine aesthetics. Leave no grievance unvoiced.
- Redefine the industry
You're in interactive entertainment. Leave games to the peons and codemonkeys. You are above that.
So why stupidly slave away, now that you know the secrets of success? Should your success vary, double your diligence. By faithful application of every tip, you cannot help but to ascend to greatness and eventually carve your name on the slate that lists the gods of game design, which have trodden this same path.
-- The Devil's Ludographer
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