If you could choose a role in a gamedev. team...

    Which one would you rather be? 0

    1. 3D Artist (0) 0%
    2. 2D/Texture Artist (0) 0%
    3. Programmer (0) 0%
    4. Animator (0) 0%
    5. Writer (0) 0%
    6. Level Designer (0) 0%
    7. Sound FX (0) 0%
    8. Lead Designer (0) 0%
    9. Level Design Lead (0) 0%

    After seeing the "Which game company would you work for?"

    thread I decided to make a slightly similar poll. This time instead of company, you must choose the role you'd want to play in a gamedev. team. Also please explain why you'd choose that particular role

    I know most of the people on mapcore are leveldesign and visual art related, so am I. However If I could choose from any position, I'd choose Lead Designer. Not because they're management related or because they seem to get most of the fame/fortune. Because, as a Lead Game Designer, you get (full) creative freedom to make your own visions and ideas come true.

    Like building a house. Lead Designer is the architect and the artists, programmers, sfx people etc. are the construction workers that make it happen.

    Maybe one day I'd like to go into a lead design position - god knows I've got game designs I'd like to make (thougb being lead designer far from assures you of getting to choose the project ), but for now I'd prefer a technical/design oriented level design position. Which is what I just got. Woohoo Seriously though, lead design would be great but I know I'm not ready for it. Whether or not I'll feel different about that 10 years down the line or whatever, we shall see.

    EDIT: Oh yeah, the "why" part Well I've been doing level design as a hobby for a long while now, but the past 4 years have been pretty slow for me as I've been focusing on uni work. I'm looking forward to getting the oppotunity to tuck in to level design again. I am also fond of technical design work - scripting, tweaking, game balancing, etc... - so I'd rather go more to the technical side of level design than the art side, which isn't something I have all that much talent for nor experience in.

    Quote from FrieChamp

    I'd like to be CEO. If anyone knows a studio which looks for somebody to fill that position, let me know!

    Aye, that or Game Director

    Otherwise Leveldesigner is just fine

    Your poll doesnt include enough options.

    There are various of positions cool all with their own positive and negative things. I like a senior level artist position because it gives you control and influence yet you dont have to bear the full weight of tasks or responsibilities a lead has to.

    On the other hand the lead ofcourse has more control which is good but often the leads have little time left to actualy make things themselves. All they are doing is sheduling, running around and looking at things. Thats not too fun when you like making a lot of stuff on your own.

    I think the nice in between route would be something like an environmental art director. Gives you the ability to actualy work on things instead of spending all your time on sheduling and managing while you still have influence and control.

    Quote from JAL

    If I could choose from any position, I'd choose Lead Designer. Not because they're management related or because they seem to get most of the fame/fortune. Because, as a Lead Game Designer, you get (full) creative freedom to make your own visions and ideas come true.Like building a house. Lead Designer is the architect and the artists, programmers, sfx people etc. are the construction workers that make it happen.

    Perhaps once upon a time, but very rarely nowerdays. Working for independent developers you are generally constrained to the publisher's will since they pay the wages of everyone on the project. It's my experience that a lot of external producers (external to your company - i.e. the publisher's producer) are frustrated designers and very much want to direct and control the content of games they are involved with.

    On the other side of the coin, working for a large multinational, the lead designer has many levels of creative control and direction above them. Here level designers (like myself) report to the Lead Environment Designer, who reports to the project's Design Director, who in turn reports to a Creative Direction Group. All these have creative control above and beyond the Lead Designer.

    Nowerdays the only way you are going to get the kind of creative control you talk about is (as Freichamp says) to be CEO or I guess, to fund your own dev studio.

    Quote from Hourences

    Your poll doesnt include enough options.There are various of positions cool all with their own positive and negative things.

    I know there are Lead, Senior, Junior etc. names for almost any type of job. However the forum doesn't seem to support the option of infinite poll options, and even if it did, there are just too many different job descriptions to list them all. I tried to make the poll rather simple.

    So if there's a specific job like Senior Level Artist that one would like to be, one can just post it on a reply.

    Oh

    For now, I'd love to work as enviromental 3D artist, anything from props to entire levels

    But I'd also love to design my own game sometime, so a game director or so would be awesome! Atleast if I had to chance to work with lots of great people who have awesome inputs etc.

    BTW. Is there a lot of places to fill at Game Indrusty? There are a lot of next-gen games coming out in couple of year, so they need a lot of workers

    Programmer. More specificly the rendering engine programming. The programming workflow comes easier to me than the artistic workflow. Rendering engine programming because it combines my love of making art (images) and my love of programming.

    Can't wait for my Computer Graphics programming course next semester

    Quote from JamesL

    It's my experience that a lot of external producers (external to your company - i.e. the publisher's producer) are frustrated designers and very much want to direct and control the content of games they are involved with.

    Nowerdays the only way you are going to get the kind of creative control you talk about is (as Freichamp says) to be CEO or I guess, to fund your own dev studio.

    I sadly agree. The games industry has become more like the movie industry.

    Dev Teams come up with ideas and the publishers pick up the ones they think are profitable.

    It's obviously a bigger financial risk to publish game about killer pancakes with motorsaws etc. than a ww2 fps game.

    That's what limits the creativity of the developers.

    I think in the future networks such as Steam will offer a breakthrough chance for small game dev companies that have new and original ideas (take Darwinia for example).

    Not nearly as much funds are required to release a game via Steam, and it will be available for anyone with an internet connection.

    I updated the Poll with a couple more Options.

    Lead Designer is more like a Producer here at GBX, though we all get to design the game (which is rather cool). Mission design is carried out by us LDs and we get input from everywhere else in the company.

    Even at Gearbox, LD is semi split up with some of us focusing on the combat and others focusing on moment work (intros outros, and the fun things in the middle). I like the moment work, mainly since its a lot of creative freedom to have the scene play out to my, well mainly Mike's, wishing.

    I voted Level Design Lead, but this is a really hard question for me to answer as there are so many things in game design which I like. So far I have had a lot of fun both as level designer, lead level designer and project leader. I also got fun when I help out with coding or skinning, so that would also be cool if I had enough skills in those areas.

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