From Euroset to game designers or 5 beginner mistakes

    Hello! My name is Nikita, I am engaged in game design. They periodically ask me how I got to life such as how to start sawing games. The other day, my invaluable experience turned a week without a year, in connection with which I decided to share some impressions of the industry as a whole and a number of things that torn the template for me personally. In short, tell your story.


    - Correct self-positioning in a team is the key to success.

    This graphomania can be curious both to people who are timidly interested in the topic (we are generally inquisitive people), and to gametraders - just for lulz.

    A year ago, after studying for a bachelor of business informatics, I came across a favorite incident of graduates: experience requires work, work requires experience. I must say that my achievements in game development at that time were limited to reflections on the topic: “it would be great ...”, which didn’t really excite potential employers represented by game studios.


    - There was, however, another concept of desktop based on the “monopoly” with an expanded economy and a full DnD. So, he excited employers even less.

    Having communicated with them all summer, having completed about a dozen idiotic test tasks and having received the equivalent number of “call back” s, I decided to spit and make my own game - with preference and courtesans, as usual. And he made the first, in my opinion, mistake. I started to read. The fact is that Todd Howard, Gabe Newell or Sid Meyer have not written memoirs yet. And among the abundance of English-language books and articles, not all were really practically useful. Of course, there were useful books like Richard Bartle's Designing virtual worldsand The art of game design, but the books do not give practical experience. As I later heard from colleagues: instead of reading, you need to sit down and do . Anything: fashion, cards, concepts, art. Something to touch. If in your resume, besides the standard ones, “I love games, I want to make them for the past two years.” Vasya, 23 years old ”there will be a link to an amateur mod to the same TES with a hundred or two downloads - this will put you in an absolute minority among all applicants.

    So, I suffered nonsense until the fall, and then I happened to get on an open day at my alma mater - Higher School of Business Informatics. The name of the new program " Management of gaming online projects"Pleasantly awakened the soul and inspired vague hopes. I was delighted with such theses as: “a game designer is a career dead end in the industry”, “the bar for entering the market has become practically unattainable for startups” and “you will never make the game of your dreams”, which was uttered with a charming smile and caused great enthusiasm among listeners. :) But enthusiasm is enthusiastic, and education costs money. And I decided to earn them. So I got to the wonderful institution "Euroset". “Well, given the assortment on sale, it's almost close to IT,” I consoled myself. However, working in retail gave me a number of not the most useless skills, such as arrogance, reinforced concrete calmness and the ability to get out of any idiotic situation that my bosses, colleagues or clients put you in.


    - Euroset - the service is simply stunned!

    It was possible to rush around the salon with two million rubles in your pocket: collect collection, while dodging the slammed client. Sometimes, I ran around Maroseyka for a thief who grabbed an armful of phones. It happened and sleep in the back room, and celebrate New Year there. In general, I got a dozen points of endurance and charisma, scored loot and set off into the warm embrace of Sony PlayStation tech support.

    Meanwhile, study was in full swing: we were told how to calculate the in-game economy and financial indicators of the projecthow to divide players by psycho-types and predict their behavior, how to manage a team and operate a running project. And I thought: “Hey. I can do all this. ” I got summer achievements from the mezzanine (I don’t know why, I redid it all the same), connected a friend, and together we buried the ax of war and broke the start-up piggy bank. This was my second mistake . Yes, wage labor is very convenient for people who do not know how to engage in engineering and design. But it is fraught with too many pitfalls breaking the legs of inexperienced organizers. Given the availability of WYSIWYG development tools, now I would rather try to do something on my own, without relying on disinterested artists .

    The fun began already at the stage of searching for the artist. For a simple, three-page mobile game, a developer was sought that could support both the client and server parts. Perhaps the requirements were somewhat inadequate, but they were dictated by both financial considerations and the issue of comfort for work in the absence of experience. The number of very strange proposals we received - ignoring the conditions of execution, the theses set in the ToR and the volume of remuneration - grew exponentially. Many applicants, apparently, did not even read TK. It was a shame, in vain did I pour 50 pages of water?


    - This offer has perplexed us: when we saw the total cost, we did not know whether to laugh homerically or to cry.

    But despite all our attempts to flip the project at the very start, it began to move in a shaky and swanky way. An artist was found who could get into my head and download a picture from there, which could not but rejoice. And the study, meanwhile, was nearing completion. It was necessary to write a graduation project, which I, without hesitation , transformed from the dzdok of our game. In principle, all students of the course were engaged in similar activities, and our teachers, distinguished professionals in their field, working in leading industry companies, provided us with comprehensive support and advice. And my third mistakeconsisted in a lack of understanding of the value of these consultations and the knowledge that I could have gained if the work allowed me to devote more time to my studies. Information that is far from academic theorists, obtained first hand, repeatedly tested in practice and updated by specialists, should be eagerly absorbed and disposed of in the most efficient way. Many of the things that I had to learn through my own cones were presented at the seminars in a ready-to-use form while I was solving the problems of PSN users at work.

    Nevertheless, the diploma was written and successfully defended, and my project was the very experience that potential employers were eager to see in me. I was lucky to get an interview at Mail.Ru Group and, having successfully completed the test task of writing a small dzdok to a popular mobile game, take the position of a game designer.


    - Beauty!

    Of course, I did not escape the fourth error. The long-awaited work, graduation, prospects - all this got me crazy, and I began to clutch at everything: tinkering at game configs at night, reading ready-made documentation, learning a scripting language (a very convenient tool), at the same time working on my project and work. As a result, after three months I began to fall asleep at the computer and did not appear at home for several days. And I realized that I was doing something wrong. I had to slightly adjust my life activity, based on the thesis "do as little as possible, reasonably and enough . " However, workaholism is contagious and difficult to cure: right now I'm writing this article instead of playing Black Desert.

    To date, I am already working on the second project at Mail.Ru Group, and our mobile game is preparing for presentation at DroidCon at the end of the month. Perhaps my last and main mistake is the illusion that you can study, systematize and avoid repeating all these mistakes. After all, there is something eternally romantic in walking the rake, right?


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