I imagine George Lucas had specific ideas of how he wanted everything to look and feel for his Star Wars movies. I thought Episodes 4-6 were masterfully done in creating environments and expressing the many dimensions of conflict. Some key scenes that really expressed visual storytelling are: * When the Milennium Falcon was racing away from the Death Star II as TIE fighters were streaking past towards the background (as the huge space battle was just beginning) * As Lando was making a comment to himself about Han not letting him down, and we see an Imperial Cruiser floating above the surface of Endor throught he cockpit of the Falcon * As shuttle Tiderium approaches the Death Star II with the Super Star Destroyer drifting forward in the background, with the Endor moon below These are all from Return of the Jedi - I can't think of any others off the top of my head right now. My point is that I think George told all of his modellers and artists things like "I want a ship that has THIS kind of presence. See what you can come up with." and later he looks at some examples and says "I kind of like this idea, but it would look better if we did this and this and this", totally keeping in mind the story he is wanting to tell, and the role he wants everything to play. ... So as game designers and directors, do you have a clear idea of how you want everything to look and express itself, or do you let your artists go wild with their own versions of everything, allow them to present examples, and as a group choose what looks best, etc. I would think that if you let the models give you new ideas about what else the game could be like, it might jeopardize your original ideas of what you were wanting to express in the game in the first place. Naturally, you want the game to be fun. You want it to be something people will buy. I guess I'm interested in how the artistic process works in terms of presentation of idea, rough drafts, group discussion, staying with the goal of what the game should be like, etc. and how everything could change based on what the artists present, and how much of the end product stays faithful to the initial vision. How beneficial is it to change it from your first instinct? Did anything change that you were sorry you didn't trust your first instinct about? [edited by - Waverider on December 13, 2002 1:53:14 PM]

first of all, you can never get it *exactly* the way you wanted it unless you do it all by yourself.
then it all depends on the artist you´re working with, some want or need detailled instructions, some come up with great stuff when you just give them loose guidelines... as for the "vision" being in danger, you´ll just have to check which points are important first and communicate that to the artist..

Ideally, I think a game designer should be a jack of all trades, and know a little about almost everything. From programming, to 2d art, to 3d modelling and animation, writing, and even a little about music theory.

Much like a movie director, the designer can''t do everything himself, but he should at least get people whom he can easily communicate his ideas to. If the designer/director can''t convey properly how he envisions the game or scene, the end result winds up a little diluted (although not necessarily for the worse...I am now convinced that had George Lucas had the technology he had today back in 1977...Star Wars would have sucked and been just like Phantom Menace).

So, there''s something to be said for just letting the game artists do their own thing. But remember, if your game world is a dark, grim and gritty world, but the artists design cute Disney-like characters, it will ruin the feel of the game. There was also a an article on the postmortem of Tropico about how the artists didn''t have a central vision. So some artists drew the characters very realistically, and others very cartoony, and the result looked a little slipshod. So make sure that at the least, you communicate with your art team alot.

My only real experience of designing a game in a team comes from working as half a two-man team. Loosely speaking, he was the artist, I was the programmer, and we met in the middle on design issues, but we were using pretty high level tools throughout, and only doing very simple games (though we did keep coming up against the limits of what the tools were designed for... In fact, I keep thinking we should try and revive our last project now that I''ve got a good enough grasp of C++ to handle the requirements... I hope)

Throughout the graphics design, we were both throwing ideas around.

I know this isn''t exactly the sort of thing the thread started with, but I think if you have a small enough team, it can be beneficial to give everyone the chance to comment and influence the direction of the game - after all, if, as Dauntless said, designers should know at least a little about everything, IMHO, the entire team having at least a rough idea of all aspects of the design can only be a good thing...

I guess it wouldn't be fair to say that developing a game is totally parallel with George Lucas' efforts to make his Star Wars movies. It's easy to see where several people speaking together can come up with ideas for and develop a game, instead of it being entirely dictated and guided by the high resolution visions of one individual.

I started the thread with the sense of how neat it would be to be in Mr. Lucas' shoes, to have the intense and complete ideas that he has, to know exactly how he wants everything to look, and to endeavor over these many years to assemble those ideas into what he wanted to express all along in a way that everyone else can experience.

Of course, he's not the only one who has done this, but to me, his work is the most visible example of that (I still like Episodes 4-6 better, though, which was before I even had a grasp of who the man was, or how accessible such things are to all of us if we only apply ourselves)

[edited by - Waverider on December 14, 2002 11:02:39 AM]