3 Areas a Game Designer Needs

A colleague of mine recently posted a job opening for a Lead Game Designer. He’s a founder of a small indie game studio, and is understandably keen to hire the right person to guide the team’s design process. As he put together a design test for prospective candidates, he asked for my input on what makes a good test. Fully planning to receive hundreds of applications (both qualified and um… not), he wanted a design challenge that could quickly highlight skilled designers and screen out the rest. Surely there must be best practices for creating these things?

A thousand opinions quickly bubbled through my brain. To be clear, I am not the greatest designer in the world, nor have I managed full design teams. But I’ve completed a few design challenges in my day and I’ve interviewed my share of game designers. Game design has always been the most exciting field to me, chock-full of fantasy, critical thinking, and technology. It’s also practiced by devs of varied interests, skill sets, and ability. Despite the differences in roles and approaches, I feel confident that I now know what to look for, both in a test and in person.

I believe comes it down to three attributes: empathy, creativity, and communication. These skills are visible. They matter on projects. You have them or you don’t. If you’re a game designer, you need to hone these areas.

Empathy

Good designers start with player experience and translate this into concrete ideas. Empathy is about occupying the player’s head, and player-centric design is about letting that guide your process.

What emotional states do you want a player to undergo, and how will that make him think about the game? What types of choices should he be making at any given time, and under what level of cognitive load? Intention is everything here, as the aesthetic of a game experience is driven in no small part by designers. They should be constantly checking their work through the theoretical eyes of their audience.

Another aspect of player empathy is imagining how your audience will actually use your systems. Once players are introduced to your features, their mental models evolve as they comprehend them better and finally learn to exploit them. Good designers understand this arc and can quickly describe a system’s common use case along the way. They can also foresee unintended use cases; games are unpredictable and we need to build the guardrails. Thought experiments and playtests are great for revealing where players might go off the script, and good designers take advantage of these to create proactive systems.

Creativity

Creativity is an extremely broad category, but it’s hard to doubt its importance in when making games. Game designers are leaned on to form new, playful ideas that are both exciting to play and can actually be built by the dev team. From concept to tuning, creative problem solving is a designer’s biggest muscle.

One critical skill for any designer is a high degree of design fluency. This is the ability to generate many different solutions to a problem, and is widely used as an important assessment of overall creativity. Game development is inherently plagued with hiccups with technology, resources, and unimpressive gameplay. Can we pivot the player’s experience around these unforeseen issues? Can we improve a feature by changing it to better harmonize with other mechanics? When brainstorming new concepts or changes to the game, it’s incredible valuable to surround yourself with people who can offer idea after idea.

Originality is another crucial aspect of creativity and the design process. I’m sure you’ve heard the cliché that everyone has great ideas, and it’s all about making them happen. Sadly, this isn’t true — coming up with good ideas is a rare (but trainable) skill. So while it’s easy to rely on tropes from other games, quality designers can consistently generate new concepts. They can breathe new life into old ideas. Push your candidates for design novelty, in your test and in person — they should feel at home in this space. Design tests are are a great way to showcase a flare creative thinking, so give them plenty of opportunity.

Communication

What good is a fantastic dreamer who can’t communicate? Designers are often vision holders whose ideas shape the work of different disciplines. They must successfully communicate ideas with programmers, artists, producers, audio specialists and other designers. Weed out applicants who can’t quickly and fully explain their thoughts.

Tell your candidates that you want to them to show the design process for the test. This is important as a separate deliverable to showcase their ability to be deliberate in their search for good design. And it doesn’t have to be pretty — while their approach should be methodical, their results can be all over the place. They should be able to communicate the design’s intention, some cast-off ideas, rationale for decisions, and other pertinent explanation of for how they reached their final concepts. This is a good window into how designers think, and shows whether they can systematically approach a design solution.

Valuable designers also have strong internal salesmanship skills, and use them to sell their ideas. Bad designers mandate systems and changes for others to build, relying on their authority to push them through. Always remember that game development runs on excitement and buy-in from the team, and designers provide a lot of that energy. Challenge your candidates’ answers, and look for them to sway you with reason. Good salesmanship skills ultimately make designers more effective at seeing their vision through, as they’re able to harness the collective passion of their teams.

While high-level communication is critical, great designers have a grasp of details. Their writing may have a few spelling or grammatical errors, but there should be no ambiguity as to the design’s intention and form. They understand the details of what programmers need to know, what artists need to see, what producers need to hear. Regardless of a feature’s complexity, great designers will compartmentalize and drill down to the particulars when needed.

There’s a lot to being a great game designer. The field is called on to wear many hats and deal with many problems. But I believe that empathy, creativity, and communication skills are the most fundamental and far-reaching areas to master. They directly impact a project’s quality and development process, and they make skilled designers stand out from the chaff. Concentrate on them in your design tests and interviews, and you’ll find the right people for the job.

Did I leave something out? Let me know if I missed something you look for!

John Nelson Rose is a game designer and engineer at Lumosity. He has designed and programmed many titles, from action games to first-person shooters to kids’ apps to brain games. He is a fervent crusader for rapid prototyping, tiny dogs, the industrial mystique, and vegan cuisine.