A Designer’s Perspective: What I Want
When it comes to doing my job, there are really two things that I want. These are more logistical concerns, as opposed to the things I want in order for my job to be fulfilling.
#1: Iteration
Every design task should include a degree of iteration. Code shouldn’t get released without thorough testing and debugging. Design shouldn’t be any different, it just requires a different kind of testing. In some ways, design is like trying to predict the future, but with far fewer variables. While designers try to account for everything that’s going to happen with a system, it’s simply unfeasible to expect to get it perfect the first time. And that’s assuming that the system design can be implemented to the letter of the design - in reality, the design is likely to change as it gets implemented and it’ll need adjustments as a result.
#2: Tools
Given enough time, a skilled carpenter could build a house without any of his specialized tools. The finished product might be acceptable, but it’d be inferior to the alternative - and it’d cost more to build. Tools are a vital part of most game development jobs, and design is no exception. There should always be a robust process for creating and maintaining tools. While it’s possible to designers to build many of the tools they need on their own (albeit typically slower than with developer support), that requires allotting extra time for the creation of said tools. I’ve done some crazy stuff in Excel - Kevin teases me for building an artificial file diff in Excel, although that wasn’t very complex. Still, there are tons of cool things I could do with the resources that are already at my fingertips - Excel, SQL, etc - with sufficient staging time and no developer support. Most of my spreadsheets are hastily created to be functional, but not elegant. Tools should be elegant.
There was a time when I would have been willing to do that all in my free time. That time died a gruesome death after I got tired of working myself into the ground (~80hrs/wk avg for 3 years) and decided that had to stop. While I still spend a lot of my spare time researching design-related topics, I consider that more of a general-purpose study that’s pertinent to my career. Perhaps it’s a fine line, but the same doesn’t apply to learning how to do a particularly awkward function combination in Excel to target a specific math problem.
It’s all the same
It’s easy to succinctly summarize the preceding paragraphs: I want the time to do things right. Really, that’s all that my mini-list needs. And what’s the one thing you don’t have in game development? Sufficient time. This isn’t a knock against my employer or any of the companies I know, it’s just something that I consider to be an unpleasant reality in the games industry.