4 ms·
All of the answers to these problems are trivially easy. I maintain my stance that "game designer" is not a real job and is just a fanciful cushy position for p
by feoren 2y ago
All of the answers to these problems are trivially easy. I maintain my stance that "game designer" is not a real job and is just a fanciful cushy position for people who were already privileged in life to pretend like they're doing hard work. Things like "do doors lock behind the player?" is not anywhere close to as hard as the very easiest problem faced by the actual programmers who are doing the actual work on your project.
"SOMEONE has to solve The Door Problem, and that someone is a designer." -- it sounds like literally thirty minutes of work per week. Just admit that your job is easy and cushy and the programmers and artists are the only ones doing any actual work. They make fun of you when you're not in the room. They add ducks to animations just so that you can feel important by telling them to take them out. You're a parasitic drain on the project, not a "big idea man". Everyone already knew whether or not that door should lock before you were asked.
- wavemode 2y agoA game designer is just a type of product designer (the product, in this case, being a game). If you don't understand the role of product design in making a successful product (and the difficulty involved in making correct product design decisions), that speaks only to your own inexperience.
- feoren 2y ago"Product designers" are also made fun of by the people doing the actual work. I agree that it can be difficult, but those difficult decisions are worked through by the people with their hands and eyes on the actual thing (or on the actual code), not by the "idea people" who spout off nonsense and expect their fever dreams to magically turn into a useable product or useable software by their little minions beneath them. No, their little minions are the only ones who actually know how to do anything, and the "product designer" is just in their way. A "product designer" is someone who got daddy to fund their "gentleman's Cs" MBA degree and then posts online saying they have a brilliant idea for a company and they just need to find some programmer to implement their grand "Facebook for Dogs" idea and they'll graciously give them 20%. Someone who idolizes Steve Jobs and whose eyes glaze over when any of the actual fractal complexity of the world is presented to them.
- sdwr 2y agoI'm making a game right now, and I'd kill for a good game designer. The gap between "high level goal" and "features to implement" is just as complex and squirrelly as the gap between "features to implement" and "lines of code".
- karurosu 2y agoI work on a project with a decent ratio of engineers:designers. A good designer is not just "ideas people", they are fairly technical without getting into the nitty gritty. If one side gets too much power then it can land in situations like you describe (design makes unrealistic requests, or engineering over constraints the product). When the balance is right then working becomes quite amazing, nothing better than seeing my work (engineering) used to make stuff I couldn't even think of and I can see the appreciation of helping design make their vision come true.
- nuancebydefault 2y agoOften the most difficult problem to solve is figuring out which problems to solve. That difficult problem is often 'simply' a design choice with a high impact.