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    Breaking Into Video Game Design
    Breaking Into Video Game Design
    Breaking Into Video Game Design
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Breaking Into Video Game Design

    By Charlie Czerkawski

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    About this ebook

    In the eyes of many young people, breaking into the video games industry is the holy grail of future employment. For those who are passionate about games, making them for a living seems to be the best thing you can possibly do.

    But genuinely useful advice is very hard to come by. Careers advisers will tell you that you need to be able to program, friends will suggest that digital art is the key, and universities and colleges will offer you a bewildering variety of courses with 'video game' or ‘computer game’ in the title, some of them clearly more technical than others.

    This short (74 pages) guide aims to give an injection of reality while at the same time trying hard to encourage prospective game designers with good practical advice.Choosing courses and defining career pathways in this rapidly developing industry sometimes seems like negotiating a minefield and is often managed more by good luck than good organisation.

    This guide doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but it certainly aims to arm the prospective student with information and positive encouragement, at the start of what will be a long, confusing but always exciting and worthwhile journey. It is aimed primarily at school and college students who may already know that they want to work in the video games industry, but aren't yet sure which sector or course is right for them, but it may also be useful for anyone seeking a change of direction.

    In particular, it deals with the evolving concept of 'game design' - what it is, what it is not, and what are the current routes into design as a career.

    Charlie Czerkawski is a Scottish born game designer and one of four partners in Dundee based, award winning, independent video game developer, Guerilla Tea. He is a qualified mathematician with a postgraduate MProf in Games Development from Abertay University. He has worked in video game testing on many titles including Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City, Dirt 2 and Red Dead Redemption. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordarts
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781501429040
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      Book preview

      Breaking Into Video Game Design - Charlie Czerkawski

      BREAKING INTO VIDEO GAME DESIGN

      A Beginner’s Guide

      CHARLIE CZERKAWSKI

      All written material ©Charles Czerkawski 2011. Please do not reproduce in any form without the express written permission of the author.

      Cover image by Matt Zanetti – all material copyright.

      All the above have asserted their intellectual property rights in the material.

      Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. 

      Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

      Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011

      Contents

      SECTION 1: SETTING THE SCENE

      SECTION 2: WHAT SHOULD YOU DO TO BECOME A DESIGNER?

      SECTION 3: THE INDIE ROUTE

      SECTION 4: SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT WORKING IN GAMES

      SECTION 5: SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

      SECTION 6: UNIVERSITY COURSES

      SECTION 1: SETTING THE SCENE

      In the eyes of many young people, breaking into the video games industry is the holy grail of future employment. For those who are passionate about games, making them for a living is the best thing you can possibly do with your life. And let me start by saying, this is absolutely true, so don’t ever let anyone convince you otherwise!

      I feel that it’s important to make that clear in the opening paragraph of this little guide. Run any search on this topic and you’ll find a number of coldly scientific advice articles, crawling like spiders around the internet, waiting to trap the unwary and poison all their dreams. This guide aims to give you a good injection of reality, while at the same time trying hard to encourage rather than dishearten. And that’s my first piece of advice.

      Don’t ever let anyone discourage you. Remember that people can become disillusioned for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes those same people will take a sort of perverse delight in putting a damper on the aspirations of others.

      I didn’t quite make it, so why should anyone else?

      You have to learn to distinguish between this, and good, solid, realistic advice, of the kind which may be difficult to hear, but which will surely help you climb the ladder.

      So, what can you expect to find here? Well, this is only a starting place. Through the following short chapters, I’ll cover the role of ‘game designer’ from a number of different angles, I’ll try to be practical and realistic and attempt to give you some appropriate guidelines in order to help you to pursue the career you want. There are no easy answers and the rest will be up to you. But I won’t make it seem like an impossible dream, the equivalent of winning the lottery.

      This guide is aimed primarily at high school students, and university students without any significant work experience, who are ambitious to forge a career in game design, but there may be parts of this that would be of interest to others, perhaps at a later stage, hoping to change direction.

      WHY SHOULD YOU BELIEVE ME?

      As previously stated, there are many places to go for advice, and in what is such a fledgling (but rapidly evolving) industry, the advice will vary very much, depending upon who is giving it and when. In many cases, the veterans with many years of experience will contradict each other. So why should this book be correct? Why should you take my advice any more seriously than that of others with arguably more years of experience? The answer is simple. You don’t have to. All you have to do is take what seems useful to you and leave the rest.

      There are a handful of superstar game designers out there, such as Hideo Kojima, Cliff Bleszinski, Sid Meier, Yu Suzuki, the equivalent of the superstar writers or artists you’ll find in other areas of creativity. There are a good number of other game designers that I would probably consider to be exceptional in some way and not just exceptional in their talents. They are exceptions to the general pattern of a career in game design because of the work they do, the games they’ve released, and of course the luck they’ve had. You may become a superstar as well. Somebody has to! But meanwhile, you have to take things one step at a time and work hard if you want to succeed.

      In the grand scheme of things I am pretty much a beginner and at the start of what will certainly be a long road. I have however had some luck, mostly as a by-product of very hard work over the last few years, and I’ve helped to build up what is now recognised as a successful indie studio, here in the UK - Guerilla Tea - and had the pleasure of working on some remarkable projects.

      This is the driving force behind writing this guide and perhaps one of its key strengths. It is intended to be a realistic, but by no means pessimistic, overview of the game design career, written by someone who is very much ‘in the trenches’ at the moment. I can offer some down-to-earth and hopefully relevant points to consider along the way.

      It strikes me that I may be in a position where my advice may be more immediately applicable to a school student or recent graduate than the wise words of a thirty year veteran. That is not to say that a long time veteran does not have useful advice, because of course he or she does. But the fact is that these people are far removed in time and experience from the situation of your average student. Their situation was akin to the early days of television when people would be roped in to do all kinds of things with very little experience. They learned on the job and their expertise grew with the technology. But by definition, these same people – experienced and talented as they might be – would have very little practical understanding of what it might be like to try to ‘get into television’ nowadays, since things have changed so radically within that industry and with the levels of expertise required.

      Always remember that you never know what the future will hold and what will happen. You have to believe that your dreams stand a chance of coming true. But it can also be helpful to have a reality check to help you on your way during the early stages of your

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