   A real designer?
  Though I call myself a game designer, I feel I have designed very little. I play many games and I play games often. I make games my life. I believe I understand aspects of video games that comprise the architecture of all video games. I am part of a game development team that is working on a real time isometric RPG. We are two years into this game and we almost have an acceptable beta. Our projected time of completion for this game is in 9 months. Over the course of the game I have struggled greatly to find my place on the team not admitting to being a designer until a year into the project. A lot of my struggle deals with the fact that I do not hold the vision for the game. I am not sole designer and I don’t have last say. The truth is I feel that my place has been overshadowed by the other team members, most notably our programmer. The first year and a half of the game design was done by everyone but the graphics engine was being built furiously by our prodigy programmer. Most of the design took place within the first year at our local library and in my basement. Three days a week we would meet for about 5-7 hours and get design down. The meetings were not always the most efficient as we are all friends and liked to have fun. I never complained about team design, I would be selfish to want to design the game by myself. However, I did feel like my spot on the team was fading. During and after the initial design I struggled to find work to do on the team, I helped out the lead artist and the sound engineer as much as I could to feel helpful. I always had a close relationship with the programmer so I often talked to him about his work. I always wanted to make sure this game could be everything it could be and bring out the full potential of everyone in the group. As a result I criticized peoples work a lot, mostly constructive criticism with only a little frustration. I continued to help as much as I could, always trying to accelerate development of the game. This continued until about 3 months ago when I realized what I was doing. I was designing this game. Although I wasn’t the sole designer and I didn’t hold the vision for the game, I was designing the game. Every idea and all content came by me and I saw to it that everything was quality and worked well with other aspects of the game. Design is more than creation and vision. I think the major aspect of design is in making sure that everything works together and that everything is the best it can be. Anyone can come up with an idea for a game; a real designer can implement it successfully.  
  If you are taking that long to produce I beta, I recommend trying an easier game. I can come up with an Isometric RPG beta in a day. Try to get some more experiance with simpler games, before you tackle this one. ;quote:Original post by MetaCipher   If you are taking that long to produce I beta, I recommend trying an easier game. I can come up with an Isometric RPG beta in a day. Try to get some more experiance with simpler games, before you tackle this one.   Yeah right. Maybe with RPG Maker or some existing engine you could throw together a few quests in a day, but write a reasonable engine and implement a full story complete with graphics, sound etc from scratch that is good enough to qualify as a beta release?I doubt it. [edited by - Sandman on January 20, 2004 2:50:11 PM];quote:Original post by MetaCipher  If you are taking that long to produce I beta, I recommend trying an easier game. I can come up with an Isometric RPG beta in a day. Try to get some more experiance with simpler games, before you tackle this one.   Is that why the market is flooded with killer real time iso rpg''s created by your godliness, metacipher?  Sure.  Grow up ;  Anonymous posters are always the most audacious. ;  oh crap that was anonymous.  that was supposed to be me.  forgot to sign in however.  seriously though how am i being more audacious then mr meta?  He''s straight out saying he could do better than all their last 2 years of work in a week.  thats a little audacious sounding to me.   ;  "Game Designers" are always those useless guys you see walking around the office never really doing anything.  They''re also the first to be laid off. ;  From what i read from his post, he''s doing a pretty important position for a small independant team.  He''s managing it.  He''s doing all the communicating between all the different sections of development so that the people that are focused on whatever they''re doing don''t have to worry that the programmer knows what they''re doing, cause its being taken care of by shifter.  For an indy team i think its very important for someone to do such a position.   ;  I said beta. Meaning a simple Map/Player engine. ;quote:Original post by MetaCipher  I said beta. Meaning a simple Map/Player engine.   Well then thats not really beta now is it?  