Hi guys :),

to straighten one thing out... this is no troll post, it's really a topic that troubles me.

How do you programmers, (artists, ...) get along with your game designers?

Do you have a good relationship in your company?


Thing is... I'm really confused. Been working for several years now with different designers and...
it's really becoming frustating seeing over and over again how your work is ruined by ignorance of GDs.


My experiences:

You build a super versatile new game system, capable to fulfill all the dreams of GD... just to see it's ignored after being used to build one feature.

You build tools as they want tools and don't want to code... and they ignore them after having a first
look on them. .

You have to implement a new UI element... noone understands the concept as it collides with common
standards users know, just to create something NEW and make it "better" than others... but you have nothing
to say.
Just to accept when all the work was in vain, or that you need to start tearing the system apart again because noone understood it. Or leave it in the game, confusing users, b/c GD won't admit that they failed.

They are key persons determining if a game succeeds or not and yet... I lack the impression that they have a feeling for their responsibility and that creating games isn't a playground.




Again... it troubles me... so...
How are your experiences?
Did I have just bad luck... ?
Actually I'd love to hear that ... else ... I don't know if I want to be part of this industry any longer... :-/

(edited)

Your issues seem to stem more from the reality of no-one actually effectively communicating with each other as to define what is really needed as opposed to what is wanted "at that time" and a basic lack of leadership functions being exhibited by the project manager to ensure better synergy.

If you give each member in a team too much autonomy without checks and balances in place then you might (though highly unlikely) succeed in making a great game but reality normally demonstrates otherwise.

Most of the time I'm a graphics programmer, so my 'clients' are the artists, not the designers... but the same experiences can occur when there is bad communication. You build a material system, or a shader, etc, etc, which can be used in many ways as long as certain guidelines are followed... but later you find that it's only been used for one thing and forgotten about, or that the guidelines have been ignored and all the parameters are tuned insanely so that it only works in one particular scene and breaks everywhere else...

This is just communication failure. These incidents occurred far more often when teams were spread across multiple buildings, and far, far less often when I had a talented tech-artist who had inside knowledge of all my work, and all of the artists work, and who made sure we both understood each other, continuously, every single day of the year.

If I was managing your situation, I'd create a new desk plan, where each GD was sitting on a desk shared with 3 gameplay programmers

Thank you for your replies! :-)

Yes, of course... in the end you'd have done things quicker and simpler, had you been able to distinguish ambitions from concrete plans.
Or if project management had.

Well, in our projects we normally share the same room but have clearly distinctive spaces for the different
departments with GD having some additional special rooms to meet and brainstorm.

If you are talking about wasting a lot of work on something that won't be actually used for whatever reason, then yes, it happens with me all the time (okay, I'm a mechanical engineer and I work as a test engineer).

But as long as I enjoy doing it, I get paid for it and I (and maybe some others, like my boss) know that I did the job and I did it well,, I don't care too much. Communication and planning sucks in the company, so I may get annoyed by it after some time.

Hi Szecs,

well... I see it differently as... would it be just about money for me, I probably wouldn't be in the games industry.

However... if you want to evolve, do a great project then... it just suckz if you don't really have control over the success of your work. And if it's always the same department disappointing you... and the players... then you start asking around how others feel about it.

I'm a programmer but what I've seen is that ALL designers (game or otherwise) want to play and experiment with things. Often that means other people have to do a lot of work that might get used or not.

Think about an interior designer. They want to move things around all the time and play with different materials and color to see what looks good. Often the high end designers have help doing a lot of the moving around and such. So imagine they designer says to bring up that couch and move it over in the corner. Then they say it doesn't look good so bring it back out of the house and bring in the love chair instead and put that in the corner. hmmm, still doesn't look right. No bring in the lazyboy and let's see what that looks like.

This is the same thing game designers are doing. They want to try lots of various things to see how they play/feel/look, but they don't have the skills to do most of the work themselves so that falls on others. If you hit gold then you love them. If they keep missing then you hate them and it seems all your work is for nothing.

I edited my previous post. Anyway, if you really want to control, go indie.

Hey rpiller,

I'm completely on your side there... but that's something I'm also missing in my case... designers playing around with things and trying out different combinations until it's fun...

They want to... and if they get the possibility to do it, they tend to be bored very quickly. -.-
It hurts when you see some quickly determined gut feeling parameters being thrown in the game.
If they won't work out, let a patch solve it... (which then never comes)

Anyway, it seems that the problem is on our side... be it GD, management or even me.
And basically that's also what I wanted to hear.
After all I like being in the industry.... just... the fun was spoiled in the past.

For the most part I've had good relationships with the game designers/producers I've worked with.

The group of designers I'm working with these days are fantastic. Sure sometimes they'll ask me to make changes to things I've spent a lot of time on, or make decisions I personally don't agree with, but it's a two way street. Often I'll request changes or show them a quick prototype on how I think it can be improved, and they'll sometimes agree and let me finish my implementation, or they'll take the time to explain to me the feel they are actually going for so I understand why my ideas don't fit into the overall vision.


With that said, I've also worked with a few terrible designers/design teams. Some had no respect for the teams they were directing, some were lazy, some gave no direction and then criticized the work without actually providing suggestions. Suffice it to say, these people generally don't last too long at a reasonable company though.

I generally found working on the UI team to be the worst. Possibly because at my office the most junior designers are thrown onto UI, but that is annecdotal at best.