Game Design- the beginning of my career

Game Design is one of those illusive topics that’s not always perceived as a socially acceptable thing among older audiences. This may be because they consider games as a purely childish entertainment media, although this is probably due to the fact that they were never immersed in the escapist delights of gaming whilst growing up. Contrary to what these people might believe, game design is indeed a very professional and real career, and one that can be greatly rewarding and challenging, as well as mentally stimulating.

I began my persuits in game design around age twelve when me and a friend began building up a repertoir of characters. These characters at the time where more for the purpose of our entertainment since drawing is something we’ve both embraced. Soon afterwards this idea came about that it would be very cool to turn these characters into some sort of game, but we were initially stumped as to what to do. So therein we spent that holiday break pacing around the loungeroom of their beachhouse yelling ideas at each other and scrawling down notes into out ever cluttered notebooks; this may sound slightly unorthodox but, hell, it sure works. So no more that three years later we’d crafted that game idea into one huge genre-confused, shambling mess; it was unstable, ugly and full of more plot holes than a sopie, but it really got us into some sort of methodical state for developing games. If this kind of thing interests you, i considering doing something similar, it may not be textbook but it really helps with brainstorming. So it reached that point that the game was really beyond repair, it was a mess of ideas. So we decide “Ok, lets scrap this and begin something much more coherent”, then our next game was born.

From there on in we’ve been designing games unofficially, preparing for the day when our skills would pull us from the clouds of grey, bureaucratic monotony and into the bright sunny world of the creative industry. Through this experience our skills have been refined up until the point where we believed we could make a game that was indeed an interesting experience.

Around November 2008 we decided it was time to actually see if we can do what we had been dreaming of since the beginning. We began by assembling a small team of people of varied skills- musical composition, illustration, coding and office lackying (network management, deployment and software- all that grey coat nonsense). This team started off well as we got stuck into our first instalment Silhouette (which can be viewed here The Behemoth Forums ). Production was a slow but rewarding process, most of my tasks revolved around churning out mass animations and designing levels which took up whiteboards around my room. We were doing pretty well, Jack (the guy from the beginning) and myself had completed 70% of the character animations and had began designing levels in detail with other members of the team. This was all fine and dandy until we sort of hit an issue that unfortunately left a crack in the team, i won’t go into it, but suffice to say, it hurt morale. This happened about the time when school resumed and we were abruptly broken off by the pressures of senior. Several weeks later we concluded that Silhouette had ballooned wildly out of control and to lay the foundations of our company, we needed something simple but addictive, there began the production of Run. Silhouette isn’t gone, in fact we intend to resume development after we’ve done run, as more experienced men of the trade, but until then I’m going to spend a lot of time animating a robot with a beard.

That’s how I started my ascent in the career of game development, soon I intend to write an article “Game Design for Dreamers”, a short guide to designing games and how to go about getting a foothold in the industry. I hope this article has helped some people in realising the steps to take in order to get into the industry (please, i urge you, if you do take interest in some of the ways I’ve done things, don’t take them in entirety since I’ve hit many a roadblock in my times, experiment, work out what works for you), good luck with your pursuits, and have a great day.

Miles