Design
I'm now 7 months into being a lead game designer on a major project.
I've transitioned from being the designer with esoteric & experimental ideas that needed to be tempered slowly into something actionable, to a conservative designer that finds deceptively simple ways to improve on existing designs without much effort.
People used to come to me for avant garde concepts & pie in the sky meta-frame works for game systems that reached for the stars. Now, i'm the machine that you come to when you want to make something good with a match stick, some duct tape, and an old piece of card board. My design aesthetic and finger prints are no longer to inspire imagination and grand vision, but to find a way to execute efficiently & soundly in difficult circumstances.
I've come to enjoy & appreciate this change. Junior designers tend to be very impressed with themselves for daring to bend or break the rules...pushing forward concepts that strike deep into uncharted territory & rebel against tradition. This no longer really impresses me. I'm significantly more impressed by the designer who finds a way to give his team an opportunity to succeed in making something great by taking the seemingly ordinary & worn design and making it easy as hell to work on & make special.
I have ownership over 50+ features with well over a dozen implementors that need constant design & support. They don't an idea guy feeding them grand visions of all that is possible...they need a problem solver. They need somebody that will put them in a position to waste as little time as possible chasing the wrong answers & knows how to finish something and move on. Vision helps, innovation helps, imagination helps, but when real development is happening, you want someone there that can adjust & punch it through.
Design is iterative. Your big shiny idea is murdered and bleeding on the floor within 2 months of developing it, and its closer to 3 weeks if you're good. Design does not need big idea people. It needs the person that figure out how to cannibalize that corpse on the ground without pissing people off and to turn it into something new. You'll never end up at the end where you thought you'd be.
It's one of the main reasons I love my job. The real design behind what you're attempting is always a mystery trying to be found. Your best is only a shaky paper on gift yet to be unwrapped. You're attachment to the wrapping is just another obstacle on the path.
I've transitioned from being the designer with esoteric & experimental ideas that needed to be tempered slowly into something actionable, to a conservative designer that finds deceptively simple ways to improve on existing designs without much effort.
People used to come to me for avant garde concepts & pie in the sky meta-frame works for game systems that reached for the stars. Now, i'm the machine that you come to when you want to make something good with a match stick, some duct tape, and an old piece of card board. My design aesthetic and finger prints are no longer to inspire imagination and grand vision, but to find a way to execute efficiently & soundly in difficult circumstances.
I've come to enjoy & appreciate this change. Junior designers tend to be very impressed with themselves for daring to bend or break the rules...pushing forward concepts that strike deep into uncharted territory & rebel against tradition. This no longer really impresses me. I'm significantly more impressed by the designer who finds a way to give his team an opportunity to succeed in making something great by taking the seemingly ordinary & worn design and making it easy as hell to work on & make special.
I have ownership over 50+ features with well over a dozen implementors that need constant design & support. They don't an idea guy feeding them grand visions of all that is possible...they need a problem solver. They need somebody that will put them in a position to waste as little time as possible chasing the wrong answers & knows how to finish something and move on. Vision helps, innovation helps, imagination helps, but when real development is happening, you want someone there that can adjust & punch it through.
Design is iterative. Your big shiny idea is murdered and bleeding on the floor within 2 months of developing it, and its closer to 3 weeks if you're good. Design does not need big idea people. It needs the person that figure out how to cannibalize that corpse on the ground without pissing people off and to turn it into something new. You'll never end up at the end where you thought you'd be.
It's one of the main reasons I love my job. The real design behind what you're attempting is always a mystery trying to be found. Your best is only a shaky paper on gift yet to be unwrapped. You're attachment to the wrapping is just another obstacle on the path.