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I wish I was a game developer.
McGee
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I wish I was like Ken Levine, or Tetsuya Nomura. Somebody who create this concept that grows in there mind, and actually create it.
I have so many idea's in my head, so many concepts. Thrillers, horrors, drama's (yes actual games based on real life drama, not your final fantasy drama), adventure games, etc.
SOOOO many concepts, and SOOOOO many idea, that will probably never come into fruition.
Does anyone know how you become a game developer? An when I say developer, I don't mean the person who dwells into all the technical aspects. I'm thinking more of the guys who pitches this concept for a major studio, and you explain your vision as the game moves along.
I have so many idea's in my head, so many concepts. Thrillers, horrors, drama's (yes actual games based on real life drama, not your final fantasy drama), adventure games, etc.
SOOOO many concepts, and SOOOOO many idea, that will probably never come into fruition.
Does anyone know how you become a game developer? An when I say developer, I don't mean the person who dwells into all the technical aspects. I'm thinking more of the guys who pitches this concept for a major studio, and you explain your vision as the game moves along.
McGee on
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As for how... connections, connections, connections.
That guy doesn't really exist.
I mean, they don't really pay dudes to just sit around and come up with ideas that other people make a game with. The closest you could get would be maybe being a writer?
A game developer actually has some part in developing games. Like, coding, or modeling, or level design, or something actually tangible.
Thing is the chances of making a game to your vision instead of based on whatever is known to sell millions pretty much means forming a small team where there probably won't be room for just a "I have awesome ideas" guy.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
1) Able to understand the technical aspect of the platform you're developing on.
2) Strong Artistic talents, to include writing.
3) Strong technical talents. It's part of the gig. You need to have a deep understanding of "how" the game is going to work.
4) You need some experience as that "person who dwells on technical aspects." You need experience in the field.
That is if you want a company to HIRE you. Pitching ideas is great, but the truth is that every person on the planet can come up with ideas. But are the ideas marketable, useable, timely, productive, etc. About a million variables.
No one is going to pay you for your idea-brain. You have to work for it.
At the end, do you know where ideas get you? Unfinished half-assed developed projects or vaporware.
Or anything from Lionhead Studios (AM I RITE GUYS? lol)
Step 2 - Produce a series of games of increasing complexity, developing interesting concepts and becoming better at coding
Step 3 - Decide whether your dream game can be produced over 15 years using free art assets, or if you actually want complex art, sound and video stuff.
Step 4 - If you decide it doesn't need to be pretty or out before 2025, then code away. Release beta builds and view it as your hobby for the next decade.
Step 5 - If not, leverage your portfolio of work into a job with a studio
Step 6 - Work very hard on other peoples games, becoming expert in coding, and rising up the ranks
Step 7 - As your coding skills become obselete, get put in charge of a team, do an excellent job being the main person responsible for executing someone elses vision
Step 8 - Be important enough at the company to suggest a game, and persuade investors that it will sell.
Step 9 - Be a guy like Ken Levine or Tetsuya Nomura!
Yeah, ideas are basically much less than a dime a dozen. There's no end to ideas being pitched and I'm sure everyone who wants to be involved in making games have a million ideas.
It's all about being able to actually do something with the ideas.
so that I can be the devil
and crush dreams in my left hand while sipping from the goblet of tears in my right
Development is more than just creating a concept. Concept is just the beginning.
Development involves just that, beginning with a concept and developing it into a completed product.
A concept is just an impression, an idea. You take that idea and you sketch out details of it, then you take that sketch and you flesh out a design for it, then you take that design and you iron out specific details, Then you review those details and you finalize the design and start implementing it.
Or perhaps you take the sketch and start implimenting it, and you let the implimentation reveal the details that you later finalize.
Development doesn't stop at pitching a concept, thats where it starts.
naknaknaknaknak
Heck, nowadays pitching a concept is more like step 3. After deciding on which engine you'll be using and gaining experience working with it to see what you can make.
naknaknaknaknak
While I'm a really good writer, and I enjoy writing short stories, I really feel as if video games are the best medium to tell a story. Simply because with film, and novels, it's all 1 dimensional. While your reading a novel, your creating this film in your mind. You create the atmosphere, you create the mood, you create the voice of the characters. With movies, everything is played out for you. You watch the directors creation, while your mind is taking all the dialogue, and action.
But with games, as cliche as this sounds, your PART of the action. In some games you get to create your character, you decide there path, you decide there dialogue. You get to experience the action, you get to feel the intensity in some cases.
For example, Bioshock. Bioshock is the best game I have played in my life. It has motivated, inspired, and captivated me more than any novel, or film had. With Bioshock I felt as if I was in Rapture, I felt as I was Jack. I was motivated to escape Rapture, and I was just as emotional when Atlas [supposed] child, and wife died on the sub. I was part of the action, in a way, I was figuratively in the sames of the pages in a novel.
I'd love to create games like Bioshock, which motivate, and captivate it's audience. But I just feel as if this is a poor man's dream simply because I have very little technical knowledge/experiencem, an from what I hearing you need tech experience. Which I don't have.
People often misunderstand the role of a producer. A producer is not just a pocket book, they're a managerial position, that involves money management certainly but also people management.
Can you pitch your idea in such a way as to attract the interest of coders and modelers? Do you have the capital to recruit people if just starry eyed spit and gumption isn't enough?
naknaknaknaknak
You're not making a good case for yourself as a really good writer with those grammatical errors.
If you happen to have one of those rare ideas you're just SURE will be awesome and you don't mind working to see it happen, get going and making games. Your dream of convincing someone who has spent the time to learn to make games to drop what they're doing and make yours will die a quick death. No one is born with coding skills - if you care enough, learn.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/11/3/
So gain the technical experience. You already have what you need: a computer and the internet. Go learn what it is you need to know to do the thing you want to do.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/112/1126943p2.html
Hey, I'm a game developer, I think it's probably best somebody tell you that this position does not exist. Ideas are incredibly cheap, in fact, they're very close to being worthless. Execution is the hard part, and while you say you don't want to get into technical aspects, there's really no choice (I would count being a writer at bioware or wahtnot as being technical too, I mean a specific skill). Just try and bunch of stuff and get good at something
Regardless, if you really want the best chance to actually get your idea developed your way, you're best bet is following the advice of others and creating your game piece by bloody piece by hand.
Otherwise, if it's not about being the sole creative vision behind your product, and you just want to get into the industry because Go Games, you'd have a different road. Is this about seeing your vision, or about getting into the industry?
Festing upon babies over the wailing of tormented souls.
Edit: Also green-lighting terrible terrible ideas. And being cursed and begged AT THE SAME TIME.
Sorry, I'm only 13 so I guess you could say I'm still learning. I usually just write everything in a hurry, and never bother to check for errors. My bad. :P
The bright side is that at your age you've still got your whole life ahead of you, so if you truly think that getting into game design is your calling, you have time to develop those necessary technical skills.
I once read a quote by Stephen King (in his non-fiction book On Writing I think) when he mentions people who come up to him and say "I've got a great idea for a book. If you write it, we'll split the profits 50/50".
"I have to tell them that coming up with the idea is the easy part. The hard part is sitting in front of a typewriter for six months and actually writing the damn thing."
you have PLENTY of time to learn things. There's schools and degrees you can earn in whatever field your interested in and those all occur after high school. No one at age 13 is gonna have any valuable technical skills.
Honestly, I'll say don't get caught up in the "I want be a game developer" mentality and just find things you enjoy. If you enjoy it enough persue the skillset needed to get further.
Lastly, as said earlier. Idea men do NOT exist. Designers are typically those who are good with the details of an idea and can hammer out something very specific and have a very critical eye to those aspects.
In the long run, playing games is likely more fun then making them for a lot of folks [insert article about slave driven terribad game dev here]. Reality and fantasy are certainly not one in the same.
But then you'd have to be dead inside and specialize in running great games and companies into the fuckin ground.
The higher you go in the company, the more control you have over what kind of things get made. Some lead designers or executive producers came from programming. Others came from art or writing backgrounds. There are a lot of ways in, as long as you love games and show the company that you can do something useful.
Good luck!
But it used to. Sorta. (Not really)
http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/234/
Here's an interview with one of the two folks who are credited with the creation of the Space Quest series. In addition to being the idea man and writer, he also taught himself how to program in order to be able to be the idea man and writer. You might also want to check out the EALouse and EA spouse blogs to get an idea on how this industry works.
If you really do want to pursue this career, get a degree that will let you do more than just make video games, just in case you burn out.
No one who makes a good game sits just plans how everything will be in their head and then sits down and makes it. It's an evolutionary process. The best games are made through LOTS of play testing and careful attention to detail. A good designer will be able to really observe what's going on and will apply changes to the game mechanics to make the game play better than how it was. So what starts off as a crappy prototype where all you have is some sprite moving around on the screen turns into an awesome balanced game that sells millions of copies.
You basically have to constantly ask "What would make this game better?" with each build, and the quality of game you get is entirely dependent on how well you answer that question. You also have to observe how people play the game and tweak things until your getting them to feel the experience you want. It is incredibly difficult to get the design of a game exactly right the first iteration, because some things you just won't know until you play them.
The best game developers are also the people who at some point have been able to do every aspect of game making entirely by themselves. Coding, Art, Writing, Music, Marketing and Design. Until you yourself have done all these things you can't truly be a good developer. Once you make some good games entirely by yourself, it simply becomes a matter of outsourcing stuff you don't want to do dedicated talent people. Your job then would be to constantly play the game as it is being built and decide what changes need to be made.
This is not easy. And when things arent going right (90% of the time) it is NOT fun.
Ask yourself after ten hours of working on it: Is it fun? If so, keep going and keep enjoying it. If not, finish it anyway, so you can say you did, and then one you're done, ask yourself again if it's satisfying that you made something.
I wanted to be exactly what you want to be for a long time, but like everyone else is saying, that job just doesn't exist. There's a lot of cogs in the game development machine and even "game designers" fill more roles than just "design", and all of them came from a background that involved some actual work. The number of people who get paid only to come up with ideas that get used in games is so small you could probably count it on two hands, and that list includes names like Steven Spielberg and Orson Scott Card, so if you really want that job you should try to sell a few tens of millions of critically acclaimed movies or novels or comic books. Probably harder than getting into game development the traditional way!
Seriously, I'll say it again: just make something!
Hell, every technology industry sucks.
Take it from me. You put all these hours into shit and you think "awesome, now I can have fun and get paid!"
Wrong.
Work is called work for a reason, and while you might enjoy that aspect; it very very quickly burns you out and you find that what you once enjoyed is now something you loathe. Fun and creativity go out the window so fast because it's super easy to come up with something awesome, but it takes so damn long to implement, that is, assuming you can budget the R&D time for this new and awesome concept of yours.
Stick with enjoying games for now. Cherish your freedom. It will soon go the wayside.
Also, what CaptainK says is true. Wishing gets you nowhere, you want something you have to either fake it, take it, or make it.
Good luck!
Warren Spector is a wise man. Mediocre ideas executed brilliantly make much better games than brilliant ideas mixed with mediocre execution.
Workable, real-world game design is 20% creativity, 80% technical skills.
This a thousand times. Come up with some small idea for your first game and make it ten times smaller, then try to implement it. Once you've made something small, if you still have interest start making things that are a little bigger.
There are idea men in the games industry but there are no easy rides. You'll learn a hundred times more actually going through the process (even with a game toolkit) than you would playing around with ideas in your head.
Good toolkits to mess with are things like Game Maker and Construct (the latter is completely free.) These will allow you to implement your ideas without a lot of programming knowledge and get something you can see on the screen within a day or two. Make something simple with them and see where it goes.
If, once you get into the nitty gritty, you find yourself surprised by how difficult things are, that's fine. It's supposed to be hard work. If you enjoy the creation process there are hundreds of resources out there you can use to raise your skills towards a professional level. Just remember that it never stops being hard work.
And I completely agree in that I'm not worried about people stealing my ideas, because like Spector said, either they'll make a totally awesome game out of them which I'll get to play without having to go to the trouble of making it and I'll just make a game out of one of my other awesome ideas or they'll make a lowsy game that I don't have to worry about because my version of the concept will be so much better.
Heck, I'll share one of my many potential future game ideas right now - tons of people love zombie games, but such games almost always gravitate to Action, RPG, or Shooter genres. Why not do a high level Strategy game? Basically a Sid Meier's Zombie Civilization where you control one of the last civilized groups of humanity left in a sea of undead. Start the game off a couple months after the zombie apocalypse begins. Multiple victory conditions.
I happen to think that's a good idea for a game, but it's just that - an idea. An actual good game isn't made with a single good idea - it's made with dozens, hundreds, even thousands of good ideas, both big and small. And a lot of those ideas are the kind of ideas that most people never even consider as a part of game creation - stuff like how should the user interface be set up, how should we structure the demo experience, what title gives us the greatest chance of success, etc.
Now if you want to make the games that you want to make and not just be a small part of a game making corporation, indie game development is the way to go. However, even moreso than big game development, there is no guy who just sits around coming up with ideas all day long and that's it. Indie groups tend to be small (sometimes only a single person) so everybody has to carry their own weight. I'm the idea man at Zeboyd Games, but I'm also the programmer, the script writer, the QA department, and the marketing department, and the Public Relations Coordinator, and the Producer. The amount of time that I spend coming up with game concepts is just a tiny fraction of the total time I spend making games.
I agree with Captain K. If you think this is the sort of thing you want to be doing as a career, then get started. Create a level, make a mod, learn to program, learn to draw, do something. Just remember that just because you enjoy playing videogames and think you have good ideas for games, doesn't necessarily mean that you should or even would enjoy actually making them. I happen to think it's a fun career, but it's not for everyone.
EDIT: I learned 100 times more about making RPGs from the 3 months that I spent making Breath of Death VII: The Beginning than I did from years of coming up with RPG concepts prior to that time.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
Also seconding Captain K on everything he said - make stuff. Me and Benson (thejazzman on here) were talking about this only a week or so ago because we're both fairly frequently asked this question, people want to know how to become the idea guy. Turns out, nobody's going to make your idea but you, so you should probably start making it.
Maybe I'm intolerant of idle fancy but one thing that annoys me a lot is when people say "Man, I wish I had x skill so that I could make games" and then do nothing about it. I always just think that they obviously don't wish hard enough. You get good at stuff by working at it, and as someone already said, you have the internet and a computer, and that's all you need to develop some skills. You've got years before you have any serious issues getting in the way of you doing that, so go for it.
This isn't universally true at all. I don't work in the industry yet, but I spend a lot of time making games, and to me it's not a matter of an arduous sustained effort to make an idea happen. Even when shit is buggy and frustrating and you spend all night trying to figure out why something that logically should work isn't working, there's nothing I'd rather be doing.