Steve is Chief Executive Officer and Lead Designer of game developer, Infinite Interactive.
What do you do?
I'm a Lead Designer. I'm responsible for the overall vision of the game. When a publisher approaches us about a new game or when we have an idea ourselves, it's the lead designer who comes up with the overall idea on what the game's going to be about, what you do in the game, what you spend the bulk of your time playing, the story behind the game. The lead designer will have the outline of that story.
When the designer comes up with the game idea, they pass them on to a number of other people. For instance, a script writer. The actual game play itself may be passed to an assistant designer, and they will look after the details of that part of the design. The lead designer sits at the top of the tree and makes sure that what everybody does fits in with his vision of the game, so that when it's all assembled into it's final package, the game makes sense and is pleasant to play.
During the course of creating a game, we make what's called the design document. The design document is a living document. That means the document changes over time. It will start off with about three or four pages, which is sent to a game publisher when we are first signing up the game.
After it's been signed off, the document will be fleshed out to about 50 or 60 pages. Then we'll do another pass on it and check that everything makes sense. The document will eventually grow to somewhere between 200 to 1000 pages. What we are doing as lead designers is just spending most of our days writing documents, and just occasionally when we get a chance, playing some games as well.
As the lead designer, we are the owner of the design document. We stamp the final approval to the changes that go into it. That document will go out to another three or four script writers and designers and come back over time. But we're responsible for making sure that everything in that design document is correct and is consistent. Then it goes to our producers the lead programmer, the lead artists and then down the tree.
How did you get to where you are today?
I've had an unusual path into the games industry. I started off studying medicine and decided I hated sick people. I played in a band, and quit that. I spent a year surfing. Then I came back and ended up doing a science degree, intending to be a mathematics teacher. Somewhere along the way, I happened to write a game and it happened to be a big seller. That was back in the 1980s, at the start of the games industry.
I worked part time in the industry and then full-time in the late 80s. That was back in the good old days when it was quite feasible for one person to do all of the work on the one game. You were the lead designer, the programmer, the artist, and also the musician and the sound engineer. You'd be doing basically everything. As the industry grew during the 90s, as we added more people into the projects - the programmers and the artists - a lot of the people like myself found ourselves working as the designer. So I kind of fell in to it.
It's a great fun job, and it's a job everyone would like, but we don't sit around all day playing games, as much as we'd like to.
What skills are necessary for you to do your job?
I look for is a person who has a very broad experience in a number of areas. Coming from a programming background is very helpful because as a designer who creates games, the whole games creation process is limited by what the programmers can do. So if you understand current programming techniques and programming limitations, you can understand what can be done in a game.
A wide knowledge of games is obviously helpful. No one is going to be a games designer unless they have spent many hours playing games.
But I also look for a lot more than that. I've found over the years that a person who does nothing except play games all evening every evening, is limited as to what they can design into a game to what they have previously experienced in a game. So whilst that's a valid set of experience, that's not the only experience that we look for. I like to see people designing games who play sport and who participate in a number of areas completely outside and separate to the gaming arena. It just gives them an extra set of ideas they can draw from when fleshing out a games design.
I'm a great people watcher. It can be very instructive just watching people walk down the street, to observe what people's attitudes are, what influences them, what they look at. Watching people can actually be very instructive as to how to design a game. Like watching how much fun a kid has flying a kite, and then applying that to a game. I think some Japanese designers in particular get this really right. So a broad experience - broad reading habits, broad game playing habits, and just general broad living habits.
A designer straddles both the technical and the artistic field. You have a finger in every pie that's being cooked in the project and it's important to have worked in the industry for a number of years. It's very rare for a person to come along and immediately start working in the designer role. You might come in as a level designer. As an entry level designer, you would be following a set specification to make up that level exactly to the designer's or system designer's specs. There is room for some creativity, but it's not a fully creative job. But a level designer can lead onto a lead level design and system design, but you can't get into assistant design or lead design positions until you know how the artists work on the project and how the programmers work on the project and how everything fits together. It's very important to put down about five years experience in the industry before you can move into the lead design role.
How important was your education/training?
We like to draw our candidates for entry level programming and artists to have some sort of training. But really we are more interested in how clever they are and how good an artist they are, how good a programmer they are. For a programmer, having a degree from a reputable institution or an institution shows us a person is capable of learning and shows us what they can do. That's not to say I wouldn't employ someone who had no degree. The same with an artist. We are going to look at their portfolio to see if they are doing beautiful work. If we love it and it fits with that project, then we'll employ that person.
At the end of the day we're looking at the quality of work. I've worked with people who have switched into this industry. I've worked with a person who used to be a lawyer, and a designer who used to be a geologist. In fact, another one of our designers used to be a geologist so I've had two geologists working as designers over the years. Another one of our programmers used to be a maths teacher, so we've had all sorts of people. So it's the quality of the person and the quality of their work that's important to us.
Where do you see your career going?
In my case, I started my own company. I worked for a number of years with a Sydney company and worked as a lead designer and managing the Melbourne office and we parted ways about three or four years ago. Then I started my own company down in Melbourne. Once you are running your own company there is no where else to go except get the company bigger and bigger, or broker and broker - either one generally happens. But we're still here and growing slowly, or though it's a very fickle industry.
I would recommend to anyone getting into the industry that you have something to fall back on. It's an industry that burns people out. After three or four years, we've got people who never want to see or play a game again. One of the things for a programmer is that it is good to have a formal education and a good degree because you can then move on and in to corporate IT if you don't happen to like it.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to enter the games industry?
There is about four paths into the industry: programming, art, level design, and QA which is quality assurance - the games testers. In Australia getting a job as a games tester is notoriously difficult. We don't have a lot of large testing departments or studios. A lot of our testing is sent off-shore to American publishers. So whilst there are some jobs as testers, they are very hotly contested. You need to have quite good qualifications to get into them and it's a tough ask to get in through that door.
The second area to get into the games industry is programming - probably the most common way for a lot of people. Games companies are always looking for quality programmers who have done a good degree at a university or a particular place with a games focus. The progression through from programmer to lead programmer in to the design field for someone interested in design is fairly common. That's probably the most common path for some to be a designer.
Art is the other big way into the industry, but you seriously have to be a good artist. It's very difficult to get a job with just a multimedia degree from a smaller institution. We see 20 to 30 resumes a week from people with that exact same degree, and unless they are very skilled, a lot just get a reply back saying "sorry".
The final way to get into games in Australia is through level design. It's really an arts based skill, or its sort of where art meets programming. There will be some scripting involved, sort of what you'd do with 'mod' development with a first person shooter like Quake.
