What do the best Game designers know and do?
Kutovaya Elena
1 year I am in the game industry in Türkiye.
Interesting and insightful journey. I interview a lot of game designers and have a team I built myself filtering a lot of professionals of different levels.
Let me highlight some critical for Game Design sector things I face. Additionally I hope to help game designers working on their professional skills in order to be competitive and hopefully highly paid.
- The game designer is a product owner at the same time as he/she is responsible for his/her games’ quality and match to their Target Audiences (TA);
- Target audience is another big gap as I see: no game design should be started without understanding of its TA;
- Monetization should be designed by the game designer, not anyone else - anyone else can add smth additional not based on games’ bottlenecks, balance, TA triggers etc (No Ads for example). But this part is the game design part. If you are not ready to it, you can make games without strategy to scale them - then you are a bad product owner;
- Knowing game mechanics without understanding why it will be fun and what will attract, keep and get the player back to the game is 0. No emotions and a proper design for it = a gamified app. Is it enough for you?
- Player’s experience design is one more big gap as I could notice. Lack of knowledge here leads to a low retention. What I see very often in hyper casual sector: ‘We have automatically generated level system’. An automated level system leads to a bad player’s experience. The reason - no the player’s psychology understanding behind. I would say this approach is enough to test the core but after it there should be a proper player’s experience there.
- The player’s experience design is not possible without player’s psychology knowledge. When at the interviews I ask about player’s psychology I usually hear smth ‘I think about player’s emotions and about what can be interesting for him’. This approach is already makes you stand out from the most of the game designers but still not enough. I explain: when I apply to my understanding of the payer’s emotions I use my inner feelings but they restrict me at the same time as my understanding is based on my life and gaming experience, additionally people are different but I assess emotions from my personality…. Shorter my personal experience does not allow me to predict the behavior and the emotions of other people playing my games. What to do? My recommendation is to learn gamification tools. The gamification is much more structured in terms of player’s types understanding and the player’s psychology topics than game design. Learn the players’s types (I would suggest to start with Bartle’s taxonomy but mandatory learn Andrzej Marczewski’s hexad, they give an understanding of the player’s evolution during the game as he/she changes and his her motivation changes - it means the mechanics should change accordingly, otherwise you will get a low retention);
- Let me shape the list of topics in the player’s psychology topic: you as a game designer should know the types of the players your game is aiming to, knowing the types you will understand the players’ motivation in the game - it will help to choose proper mechanics for the game and to design the player’s experience, you should also know the types of experience the players will be waiting for playing your game. It will help to complete the aesthetics part of the game and again will give insights about mechanics;
- I will finish with the following highlight: game designers working in studios and game designers working under publishers have a lot of differences in terms of the scope of tasks they work with and the level of professional and soft skills;
- Sorry, one more very important thing - I can’t ignore this crucial part - soft skills for game designers are crucial. Focus should be on communication skills development: tasks setting, conflicts solving, networking and relating, giving feedback. No seniority is possible without good level of mentioned skills.
Okey, now I stop myself. It is enough for one post. Keep learning and never think it is enough to stop self-development. It is very upsetting to see game designers with the Dunning-Kruger effect (to google yourself lutfen)*.
But the last one is upsetting for anybody.
Good luck on your way! Only you identify its depth and fulfillment.