[MUD-Dev] JOB: How to get into Game Design / Game content

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric <jonric at vaultnetwork.com>
> At 06:39 PM 23/05/01 -0700, Taylor wrote:
 
>>  Any advice on how to get my foot in the door? Are there any skills
>>  that I should be trying to get a crash course in? Any advice for a
>>  wannabe game creator?
 
> I wouldn't recommend it as a wide-open route into game development,
> but off the top of my head, I can recall several instances of people
> moving into the industry from webmastering and writing about games.
> I suspect there's a common thread here in that these people's
> activities helped them to be noticed and known, which provides an
> advantage compared to just a resume.
 
Yeah, it's actually fairly tricky, but it can be done.  There are at
least a half dozen I can think of who have made the transition, I
actually did it twice (and I think I may have been the first).

It's definitely a visibility thing, having a webmaster-editorialist
position for a major fansite makes you stand out from the crowd, you
become someone the dev team knows by name (or at least by pseudonym)
rather than one of the faceless mass.  However, it can work against
you as well, Scott Jennings (aka Lum the Mad), in spite of a
demonstrated grasp of the genre and experience in enterprise-level
database programming, was not able to make the transition because of
the baggage that came along with his website (I've had and will
probably continue to have similar issues, since I tend to be a bit
more outspoken than is strictly tactful).

The natural transition is from fansite operator to "Community/Internet
Relations", which can range from being a communications pipeline
between the players and the developers, through being a bulkhead
intended to seal off the developers from that playerbase and try to
avoid having more than one PR disaster a week.  The problem with that
job is that doing it well is defined by the dogs that don't bark,
which tends to mean that any attention you attract is negative.

However, the games business is, as others have pointed out, very
cliquish and inbred, once you've been in for a while, you have access
to the "hidden job market".  In fact, having *any* relationship to a
successful title, even if you were just the guy who fetched the coffee
for the people who did the real work, is a major leg up on your next
position.  The first step in the hiring process is usually the current
team being asked "Do you know anyone that can do X?", so networking
can be extremely beneficial.

Another route is through customer service, most of the EQ Live team at
Verant are former GM's, and some of those were originally volunteer
Guides.  I myself was a GM for EQ until it drove me insane (I'm only
exagerating a little there).  It's not an easy job, and it pays very
poorly typically (or nothing at all, if you're a volunteer), but it's
probably the quickest way in since turnover is high.

On the console side, the traditional entry-level position is Test, if
you can survive the 80-100 hour weeks of "crunch mode" for a couple of
titles and have skills that are applicable in development, you can
move up.  The subscription console MMOG hasn't happened yet (there's
been a few projects, but none very successful), but it's only a matter
of time.

Definitely don't expect to move straight to design unless you're
bankrolling the project yourself, and even then there are multiple
levels of design.  Single-player games tend to have a single designer,
who signs off on everyone's implementations (often in concert with a
Producer, details very according to project and corporate culture).
MMOG's have such hugely complex feature sets that delegation of design
authority is required, and typically subordinates are handed modular
chunks of the design and asked to flesh them out and then implement
them.  For example, I designed the economy structure for DAoC, and
until recently I was also responsible for implementing that structure
in terms of mob treasure tables and item cost settings.  One of our
programmers designed the melee combat algorithm, he also writes all
the melee combat-related code, ditto for the "Spell Guy", etc.

Other companies might structure it differently (Verant for example had
sharper dividing lines between code and design), my point is that
being a designer for one of these often means being part of a design
*team*.  Ultimately, the people with executive authority over the
design are much more managers than designers.

--Dave Rickey

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev