AdviceToolbox
Ongoing
education
Whether you’re a seasoned
developer or completely new to
game design, continue to grow
and learn. These books are
excellent resources for game
designers seeking inspiration
and new ways to approach
their craft: Chris Crawford
on Interactive Storytelling
(Crawford), Challenges for
Game Designers (Brathwaite,
Schreiber), Level Up! (Rogers),
and The Art of Game Design: A
Book of Lenses (Schell).PERSONAL EVOLUTION
“If there’s one thing the history of evolution has
taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life
breaks free, it expands to new territories, and
crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even
dangerously.” So said Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic
Park. Personal growth and change are forms
of evolution, and you’ll need to “expand to new
territories” as a developer in order to finish
your game.
If you’re the artist on your team, expect
to explore less familiar territories such as
game design and the technical aspects of
implementation and scripting in your game
engine. If you’ve worked at a studio in the
past, you may have only been responsible for
creating art assets such as models, textures,
or animations, while another team member
handled actual game implementation.
On a small indie team, you’ll need to become
intimately familiar with both of these important
parts of the pipeline. Spend time learning how
your assets actually work and interact with
other components and systems in your game.
Learn best practices for model and texture
optimisation, as well as the ways in which
animations seamlessly blend from one state to
another with minimal player
control interruption. If you
plan to have ‘on-rails’ or
cinematic story moments in
your game, explore the tools
and techniques of how these
moments will be scripted and executed using
triggers and animation state trees.
You’ll likely need to pitch in on the design
front as well, so play lots of games with strong
enemy and puzzle design, combat scenarios,
environment layout, and overall gameplay
direction/feedback so you can implement these
tactics into your own project when your designer
asks for help. Any experience you can acquire
with coding languages such as C#, C++, or Java,
will be extremely helpful as well, especially when
(not if) your programmer is swamped and needs
help debugging a script.
If you’re the programmer on your team,
learn more about the creative aspects of
production. How are 3D models created? What
types of character animations look smooth
and feel responsive to the player? How does
lighting and colour help to direct the player
through your environments? Gaining a general
“As an indie, you’ll
need to be skilled in a
variety of disciplines”understanding of the foundational concepts of
visual design, such as colour, contrast, line, form,
composition, and framing will be invaluable as
you create tools and scripts for your artists to
use. A high-level understanding of the modelling,
UV layout, and texturing process will help you to
conceptualise and design characters, weapons,
and environments that not only look interesting,
but also perform well within your game’s
memory budget. An excellent documentary to
check out on the history of cinematography,
Visions of Light, will help you to understand
how design concepts come together to help
tell a story visually. Spend some time watching
movies and playing games with strong sound
design and take notes on how certain moments
affect you emotionally. Study the specific type
of music you plan to use in your game – be it
classical, electronic, rock, or
jazz-influenced – and listen
to some example tracks and
learn about the composers
who wrote the music.
Speaking of sound and
music, it’s important for the sound designer and
composer on your team to learn as much as
possible about the overall development process.
The sonic environments in a game play a crucial
role in guiding the player’s understanding of
the story and gameplay mechanics. On several
occasions, our fantastic composer, Wilbert
Roget, II offered suggestions and feedback on
Anew’s story, player controls, and level design.
His comments were spot-on and very helpful.
This concept of personal evolution extends to
all members of your team, including designers,
project managers, development directors,
and social media managers as well. The more
holistic each person’s understanding of the
game development process is, the better the
end product of your collective efforts will be.
Say “yes” to the challenge of growth and learn as
much as you can before, during, and after the
production of your game! The road to knowledge,
especially in the realm of game
development, is never-ending.wfmag.cc \ 39 Learning new tools and
processes will be an uphill
climb, but you can do it!