So you want to be a game designer?

I spent more than ten years working as a designer in the games industry and, although I've also been an author, comic book creator, scriptwriter and TV producer, it's game design that I get asked about most often. In particular people want advice about courses and ways into the business. Well, everybody's story is different, so anything I say probably won't be usable as a route map. Even so, if it's a career that appeals, maybe some of the following will be of interest.

I think of game designers as being "interested in everything" and in particular in straddling the arts/science boundary that tends to divide the majority of people. My college degree was in Physics but I'd always been interested in English too. After college I started writing role-playing game articles, and then choose-your-own style gamebooks, and that got me into writing novels and comics. And then I got a job as a game designer at Eidos (working on Warrior Kings, pictured below) and that seemed like the job I'd been training for without knowing it.

But there are other experiences. My senior assistant designer at Elixir Studios, Sandy Spangler, came into it from a quite different direction. She studied Fine Arts, went from there into character design and animation for TV, and then into art direction at a game developer, and from there into design.

As the game designer is really the "show runner", you need to be able to communicate your creative vision to the artists, coders, writers, voice and mo-cap actors and so on. Design is almost by definition the thing that unifies those disciplines into a new coherent opus. Of course, you have to be able to nudge people to do their best work without coming across as a supercilious know-it-all. Charm, humour, passion and a collegiate manner - what I used to describe as a "bridge of the Enterprise" attitude - will all help.

I'd always been a movie and comics buff right from earliest childhood, so over the years inevitably I picked up some visual skills by osmosis. Two weeks into my time at Eidos, I was showing one of the artists how giving his Tyrannosaurus rex a low, forward-leaning stance with its body parallel with the ground made it look a lot more threatening than an upright Godzilla-style posture. A decade on, working on Dreams (pictured above) at Elixir, I was drawing on rules from cinema to create a game with the focus on character interaction. If I could rewind now, I'd probably add a cinematography or photography course somewhere in my school years.

A designer doesn't need to be able to code but it won't hurt. Coders can be pretty superior types until you earn their respect by proving that you at least understand the architecture of the system. My degree-level maths, rusty as it is, counts as mad skilz in the games industry. Likewise, while you'll probably be hiring writers rather than doing most of the game dialogue in person, you should know enough about storytelling and drama to manage that part of the process. If you like acting or role-playing, that'll help both with narrative structure and performance.

So the skills needed are:
Creative writing
Planning
Visual sense (cinematography/narrative art)
Some maths
Some code
Some drama and storytelling
Communication and leadership skills

- and I guess the angle you come at that from (whether science/maths first like me, or art first like Sandy) really depends on what you find most inspiring. Then fill in the other skills as and when you get the opportunity.

Jack of all trades vs the one-trick pony

Cast your mind back to the start of the year, and a discussion we had about how digital interactive fiction is breaking out of the gamebook ghetto by using maps, comics, animations and audio instead of prose. Or as well as prose, anyway. Among many good points he made in the comments, Emanuil Tomov said this:

"There's a useful tension, even a moral one, in reconciling minmaxing with possible unsalutary effects this could have on the narrative. Imagine a system where you can either spend or hoard XP, spending being linked to short-term benefits, hoarding being linked to 'advancement' through a richer background for the character, learning skills through interesting narrative that deepens your understanding of the character, forming certain bonds with powerful allies, etc. XP literally represents your experience in the world. Now imagine a PC who spends all their XP short-term and they're really, really, really good in a pinch; but they're completely flat, a competent, one-trick bit player in a story where they could've been much more. It's an interesting trade-off both on the minmaxing and the narrative front.

This point about the value of versatility reminded me of a section in Game Architecture and Design, which I co-wrote with Andrew Rollings to get the horrors of working in the trenches at Eidos out of my system.


The book is twelve years old now, and games have sure moved on, so don't feel you have to run out and buy it. By the time I was working at Elixir Studios, only a few years on from the Eidos of the late '90s, software development for games had been completely revolutionized, and that made my job as designer a pure pleasure. But I digress; we were talking about versatility...

Versatility in gameplay
A useful rule-of-thumb for anticipating gameplay is to ask what is the best and worst thing about each of the player’s options. For instance:

• This maneuver does the most damage, but it's the slowest
• This maneuver is the fastest, but it leaves me defenseless
• This maneuver gives the best defense, but it does little damage

And then there's a unique kind of choice:

• This maneuver is never the best or the worst, but it's the most versatile

So a useful question to ask yourself when designing a weapon or strategy for your game is "When, if ever, is this the best option for the player?" Most choices that you put into the game should be the best in some way. And one of these can be the choice that works only moderately well, but in many different ways: the jack of all trades option.

The more unpredictable the game environment, the bigger the payoff for having versatility of choice. Beginners in particular will benefit from versatile options in a game, as it means there's something they can do while working their way up the learning curve. But versatile options are handy for expert players too. When fighting an expert opponent, you must expect the unexpected, and choosing the versatile maneuver or unit may buy time to put together a more considered response.

One obvious kind of versatility is speed. The fast moving character or unit can quickly go where it's needed. So, normally, you won't want the fastest units to also be the best in other ways.

Also, the value of a fast-moving unit depends on the game environment. On the battlefields of the 14th century, a knight was deemed to be worth 100 foot soldiers. That wasn't because knights were each individually as tough as 100 men, but rather because, in a terrain of hedgerows, ditches, ploughed fields and heathland, the knight had more chance of being at the right place at the right time.

There are many other ways to make an option versatile. If a beam weapon can be used to mine asteroids as well as to destroy incoming nuclear missiles, then that versatility can make up for a disadvantage elsewhere. Of course, if there is no compensating disadvantage, there's no interesting choice. Be careful not to make the versatile choice dominant over all others. Also, be aware that the versatility of a choice may not be obvious even to you as designer. In the last chapter, we saw how the designer of the fantasy game Arena hadn't originally anticipated the way players might use the fireball spells.

You can measure versatility by looking at the switching costs in the game. This is how much it costs a player to change his mind about the strategy he's using. An example in an espionage game might be if you recruit a spy and later realize you need an assassin instead. The switching cost is however much you wasted on the wrong character, assuming for the sake of argument that the spy is not usable elsewhere. So, say that both cost $1 million. When deciding which to buy, at first you'd think, "If I buy the spy and I need the assassin, I'll end up paying $2 million. If I choose right, it costs me just the $1 million. On the other hand, suppose I buy both now. I only need one, so I'll have definitely wasted $1 million."

Now suppose there is another character, the ninja, who can function as either spy or assassin. How much should the ninja cost? It depends how unpredictable the game is. In this example, if the game were completely predictable, the player would know in advance which character to recruit and so versatility is of no value - the ninja should cost $1 million just like the others. In a completely unpredictable environment, the average cost would be $1.5 million ($1 million if I choose right, $2 million if I choose wrong), which is what a good gambler would pay you for the ninja. Since the truth will lie between those extremes, the versatile unit should cost more than $1 million but less than $1.5 million.

Versatility is more prized in an uncertain environment. No multiplayer game is completely predictable, since you can never know what the other player(s) will do. Even in a relatively predictable game, some levels are more uncertain than others. All of which makes the choice between specialization or versatility an interesting one because it all depends on the circumstances.

Kick it

With all the talk about Kickstarter (launching soon in the UK, in case you didn't see the recent comments discussion) this seems like a good moment to mention a game venture by Howard Phillips, the original "Gamemaster Howard" at Nintendo US.

I had the privilege of working with Howard a few years back when I was at Elixir Studios developing the game Dreams for Microsoft. Howard was my sounding-board for design ideas - but, much more than that, he was the project's champion at MGS. We were trying to do a Sims-beater (or at least a Sims-challenger) and Sims 2 was just about to send the Microsoft execs scurrying for cover; so having a bold, passionate champion like Howard was essential. It didn't save our project (I knew from pretty much the day I joined the company that the release of Sims 2 would kill us) but I got to work with the best darned group of people I ever met in my life and we did work we could all be proud of. And that's not nothing.

I quickly came to appreciate that few people in the industry could equal Howard's instinctive grasp of gameplay. So when he says he has an innovative game idea and he's looking for backers on Kickstarter, this is in another universe from the twits who are jumping around saying, "Hey! I never did a comic/gamebook/whatever in my life but wouldn't it be cool?" Know-It-All sounds like it'll be fun, it's original, the guy behind it has a track record second to none, and on top of all that he's one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet. If any project deserves your backing, it's this one.

The scrapbook of Ada Byron

A break from Frankenstein today - kind of. This is Frankenstein's Legions, which was originally conceived as a videogame with Martin McKenna when we both worked at Eidos, the publishers of Tomb Raider. The idea then was a strategy game of resurrected soldiers, in which you would harvest body parts from the battlefield to build your armies. (A very different concept of "the monster" from that in Mary Shelley's novel, as I discussed in a recent post.)

Over the years we had various ideas of what to do with it. A comic book? I love writing comics, but Martin has no patience for that sort of narrative illustration. A movie? I wrote a treatment. Took it to Hollywood, even. But, really, you can fritter way your life on the meandering streets of studio lots. It's wearying, even if you have a cart to ride on.

A novel was the obvious plan, which is no doubt why we thought of it last. By then I was working at Elixir Studios and, as lead designer on a big, ambitious, Sims-type game called Dreams, I barely had enough spare time to write grocery lists, never mind an entire book. So I handed it over to acclaimed SF author John Whitbourn, who wrote a cracking adult steampunk novel in our setting - which you can get as an ebook here, incidentally.

Martin and I even worked out the obligatory airships. Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Henri Giffard had both proposed more-or-less contemporary plans for dirigible galleys. In real life, the crew couldn't row with enough strength to propel Giffard's prototype vessel other than on a perfectly still day. But suppose the "oars" were driven by bicycle-like mechanisms that were pedalled. And suppose too that the people doing the pedalling had been specifically assembled to have huge legs, hearts and lungs. I love it when a plan comes together.

After Elixir folded, a victim of the economics of the UK games industry, I found myself with time to devote to cherished projects. It was either Frankenstein's Legions or gardening. During a long walk across Hook Heath on a day of freezing fog, the teenage Ada Byron peered palely from a window in my imagination and there it was: the idea of treating the material as a young adult novel. Perfect, and it only took seven years to think of it. The opening of the story, which I wrote down as soon as I got back from my walk, is actually based fairly closely on Ada Byron's peculiar upbringing:

Ada rattles around inside a cavernous manor house in the depths of the English countryside. Fourteen years old, she knows no-one of her own age and spends her days between lessons mostly in silence. When she looks outside she sees a garden hemmed in by trees and steeply rolling meadows. For much of the year the fog brings the boundaries of the world within yards of her window, which Ada loves as she can use her imagination to paint whatever she likes in the space beyond the misty white.

The house has dozens of servants. Some of them are young enough that Ada can imagine being friends with them, but in fact she hardly knows their names. They are trained to turn their backs and study the floorboards when she goes by, or to retreat discreetly through paneled doors to the hidden rear staircase.

Ada has seen the backs of those paneled doors and knows they are lined with green baize. She spends hours crouched on the lofty staircase, ear pressed to the wood, straining to hear the muffled sounds that intrude from the servants’ world – a shout of laughter, a swear word, the clatter of plates. These lively noises, muffled though they are by the baize, affront the fusty dignity of the old manor, to Ada’s great delight. In her mind’s eye she is as familiar with the servants’ quarters as the house she knows. She pictures it: noisy, cooking-smelly, crowded, cramped and cosy. A hearth-warmed cottage built up to the eaves of her home.

The manor is a vast chilled mausoleum where half-full grates and stone bedpans provide islands of inadequate warmth. Ada considers how it would look if she could view it through the eyes of a snake – the rooms seen as empty gaps like melting caverns in the interior of a huge iceberg, a smoky blue gloom lit here and there by pulsing dull spots of red. After lessons she pulls on her overcoat and goes out into the grounds, where the cold air is at least fresher and the grass is more comfortable than ancient iron-hard settees.

Ada’s only confidant is Kearne, the groundsman. He rarely speaks, having spent several years on the continent fighting in the war. The pale round scar in the base of his throat shows that he was killed at least once. Perhaps that is when he got his new hands – slender and delicate they are, younger than Kearne’s own leathery skin. They lovingly tend the hedges and lawn borders, something that was not in Kearne’s nature before he went to war.

When he speaks to Ada, it is as though he were recounting half-remembered jumbles of dream: "They give 'em to me in a big jar. I have to put my arms around it to hold it. They're not doin' nothing, just floatin' in there, I says. Soft and white like grubs in ink. Wait till we put them on, the surgeon says. They don't understand a great deal, he says to the sergeant. An' thank God they don't, sir; not likely as 'ow they'd keep gettin' up and goin' out and gettin' shot to tatters every day if they unnerstood a blamed thing."

Kearne’s anecdotes seldom have beginnings or endings, yet Ada loves to hear them. They are all she really knows of life.

Of the things written in books, and that can be measured or mapped, Ada has great knowledge. Her mother, who is absent from the house for weeks at a time, is anxious that Ada should receive a comprehensive education. Private tutors give her lessons for six hours a day in a small pantry that was formerly used for hanging pheasants and rabbits. Ada’s mother has a system of vouchers to ensure Ada is attentive. Her mind is inclined to wander, and Ada’s mother has reason to be anxious about flights of uncontrolled fantasy. The vouchers are issued when Ada achieves full marks in a lesson, and can be redeemed for small treats – an extra half-hour before bed, a square of chocolate, a sheet of music for the piano.

Ada no longer hands the vouchers in, having long outgrown the childish rewards an individual voucher can buy. Instead she collects them, pasting them into a scrapbook. She has been doing this for a long time now, and the pages of the scrapbook are stiff with many jars of gum. She leafs through it every night, marveling at the hundreds of vouchers she has collected. She has no idea what reward the book might earn when she slots in the final voucher and presents it to her mother. She has tried not to think about it, keeping even her wayward imagination from exploring beyond that door. She hopes it will be something very different in kind from earlier rewards. Something much more than a hundred squares of chocolate. But Ada is ill-equipped to imagine what such a reward could be. She has no experience of the thing she is missing.

I plotted the whole book in detail - in fact, the whole trilogy. So why abandon it? Partly because Mirabilis came along, and that grew to occupy as much of my time as developing Dreams at Elixir had. But there was something else bothering me. Ada Byron... Victorian airships... Babbage machines... It all feels a bit stale nowadays. There are hundreds of novels that recycle the same tropes, to the extent that even the (often brilliant) spoofs like Lovelace and Babbage are now pretty commonplace.

In short, I didn't feel the world needed another version of those characters in a setting with all the usual steam-powered trimmings. There has to be something new. So Ada's wan face withdrew from the window, the white curtains of fog rolled in, and I walked by in search of other stories to tell. But I like to think she's out there somewhere, yearning to experience the outside world, and if I ever find an untrodden path to her door then I'm going to help her escape.