Career Overview: What I Do As a Game Designer
Making a video game sounds like a dream job: getting paid to live in your imagination and think of new worlds that other people will experience with glee. Of course, implementing these ideas into a finished product is also tedious.
To learn a little about what it’s like to be a game designer, we spoke with Steve Bowler of Phosphor Games . Steve has worked in a variety of entertainment industries for twenty years and is now the lead designer at Phosphor Studio in Chicago. Steve was kind enough to take time out of his day and play along with our questions.
Above: Horn , a game developed by Phosphor Studios.
Tell us a little about yourself and your experience.
My name is Steve Bowler. I have been working in the entertainment industry (television, film and video games) since 1995 in various roles in animation and design. I am currently the lead designer at Phosphor Games , and for some games (mainly our smaller mobile ones) I am taking on the role of creative director.
What prompted you to choose your career path?
Love for art and a little destiny laid the foundation for this path. I graduated from college with a degree in illustration (and in 1994 that meant all traditional media; I took the first Photoshop course NIU ever offered, the second semester of my last year), so my choices were limited. I got lucky when I got into traditional TV animation (I can draw! I love animation! I have a degree in drawing!) And from there I moved on when I found a position at Midway doing motion capture for their credits. There was always an inner urge to challenge myself to do more complex and more complex things in everything, so at Midway I learned how to create animation scripts with the help of a mentor, and from that moment the design path became a new challenge. …
How did you get a job? What kind of education and experience did you need?
All we want to design for video games is a good understanding of design principles and the ability to work hard. We have guys here with DePaul design diplomas and design guys who have gone through QA [quality assurance]. I would take a new entry-level designer with no degree or “similar experience” showing their work in making their own game, not someone with a degree who couldn’t show their work in the blink of an eye.
Do you need any licenses or certificates?
It all depends on the person and the studio to which it is applied. We just want to see the ability to do the job. Some studios have large hoops to jump through. Since the most popular (and most commonly used) game engines are now free or very low cost (like GameMaker, Unity, and Unreal Engine 4), there is no excuse for not knowing how to use an engine before you apply. Download this. Make tutorials. Do something. Then be proud of it and brag!
What are you doing besides what most people see? What do you actually spend most of your time on?
I think most people think that we just do something once or twice and that works great! It’s just a matter of adding content, or maybe “correct” content. What actually happens is that we repeat something 100 times before it becomes correct. Even if we’ve done it before. Last night I was working on the correct animation for the AI when it fell off a ledge. It took me five hours to do this, and I had to turn to two people for help in thinking about the problem.
What misconceptions do people often have about your job?
These are all fun and games. Make no mistake, I really enjoy making games. This is one of the most challenging and rewarding areas I have ever worked in. It also caused me the most anxiety and stress. We work very, very hard to create what you like. Sometimes we even have unpleasant circumstances when we create things that you don’t like, and we also worked a lot on that.
What’s your average uptime?
I would like to point out that my watch is not typical of our office and not typical of the industry. I have a definite hang where I cannot miss something if I know I can fix it, so I work hard. To be honest, I stopped tracking my watch because it gets dull to think about it. I bet if I found myself an “easy” week (sometimes I have to watch a DVD or a show or play a game that I’m not working on) it would be a 60 hour week. I bet most weeks I train for a minimum of 80 hours. I often steal my watch on weekends to work on my laptop, polishing things in the game or composing a new RFP or presentation for an upcoming project, and more often than not at night I open the editor and work until midnight or until 1 am.
What personal tips and shortcuts have made your job easier?
It helped me a lot to learn to fail faster and approach each problem as a unique task. Even when you do a continuation of what you have already done, there are always new problems that need to be addressed, and I do not like to rely on old crutches. In our business, it seems like there are often no shortcuts, so personal experience and problem solving are often the best tools in trading.
What are you doing differently from your colleagues or colleagues in the same profession?
Most of the designers I work with have been designers throughout their careers. I came from animated television and film, and then motion capture animation, and I have a degree in flat traditional art, so I have a very wide T at the top of my job profile. I’m actually not a very good “traditional” designer in the sense that I don’t create visual scripts or design levels better than any of my colleagues. What I can do is build on what I’ve learned here and help build entire systems and characters and tie them all together.
What’s the worst part of a job and how do you deal with it?
I think the worst part of the job is the hours and stress. If you are going to be effective at this level, you need to be very careful about what you do, which takes your family’s time and sometimes hurts. Okay, it hurts all the time when you’re not with your family. The only solution I have so far is to try to focus as much as possible on what you are doing. If you are at work, work. Do it your best, and don’t waste time away from your family in trash if you can. Then, when you are with your wife and kids, focus on them and make this time as interesting as possible.
What is the most enjoyable part of the job?
The best part of doing this is hearing from someone that they liked what you did. Any stranger will say, “Have you worked on this? I loved it! “Will always make my day. Someone who thinks your work is important, no matter how little or what you do, I think helps make it all worth it.
How much money can you expect at your job?
Gamasutra has a really great industry salary guide that is accurate enough across all disciplines of game developers (design, art, coding, and manufacturing) that they update every year.
How are you progressing in your field?
Great job, reliability, ability or commitment to take on a lot of responsibility always works.
What do your customers underestimate / overestimate?
I think customers never appreciate the work or effort it took to get their hands on a product, and I understand that. Nobody thinks about the workers in China who made their iPhones, so it’s unwise for me to ask them to think about the work that went into the game that runs on their iPhones. But it would be great if there was more understanding. Nobody looks at a giant building and says, “Oh my God, what is this SHIT ???” if one little cosmetic thing is wrong with one corner of a building because they understand how much effort it takes to create something so big. People even seem to understand how much a working film costs because they can see people on the screen and mentally predict how long it will take, with subconscious mental comparisons to making a home movie. But games? Most people don’t create games, they just consume them. Therefore, they usually only value them as consumers.
What advice would you give to those who want to become your profession?
Create games, write code, create art every single day. If you’re not doing it for your job, do it for yourself on weekends. You cannot become the best in one course, an advanced degree, or even a single job. You must constantly challenge yourself. The whole process is a journey, and if you don’t constantly strive to improve yourself and your skill, you are lagging behind everyone else. And don’t force it! If you feel like it’s work and it’s unnatural, you should probably find something else that you enjoy doing every day! But most importantly, don’t create games just because you love to play them. You will only kill your hobby. You should enjoy the challenge of creating this problem in a game that didn’t exist, and then fix that problem by creating it out of nothing.
This interview has been edited for clarity.