Archive:PlayNOW! - 1 - The Department

Description

About

• Published: 12-21-1999?
• Host: Playnow.com.au
• Author: Paul O’Connor
• Game: Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee
• Format: Publised Online

The Designer Diary

Part One: The Department

A New Monthly Feature

Welcome to the first installment of this exclusive game design diary from Oddworld Inhabitants. We’re an American software developer, located on the central coast of California, best known for our Playstation titles Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus. This game design diary will be your window to the world of development here at Oddworld, both on our current title, Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee, and on other projects and company-related information.

I’d like to thank the folks at PlayNOW! for making this space available. I appreciate this opportunity to keep some of our most dedicated fans up to date on the happenings here at Oddworld Inhabitants.

As we count down the months to the release of Munch’s Oddysee, I’ll be covering a broad range of topics. I’ll give you a glimpse of the characters, events, and challenges that await you in our next game. I’ll tell you a bit about Oddworld culture—​both that of the game world, and of the real life Oddworld Inhabitants that make those worlds. I’ll show you what game designers, artists, programmers, and producers do every day.

Because I am a game designer, I’ll start things off with a description of our design department and the people in it.

The Design Department

Oddworld Inhabitants employs four full-time game designers, with a fifth who started in January. We also have an assistant director inside the department who does significant design work.

The overall game design of the project is the responsibility of the game designers. While increasingly common, it’s still unusual to find people in the business who do game design and nothing else, and even more unusual to find so many of them working on the same project. For many years, the model in this business was to combine game design responsibilities with other tasks, usually programming or project management. As the industry has grown, and as game budgets and expectations have ballooned, it’s proving to make good business sense to hire game design experts to make the games fun, easy to play, and challenging. Oddworld is a forward-looking company in a lot of ways, and that includes a dedicated game design department.

Who Are These Guys?

Oddworld’s designers are a varied lot. Our assistant director is Chris Ulm. Formerly editor-in-chief of Malibu Comics, Chris joined us as a game designer on Abe’s Exoddus, and is a director-in-training for Munch, although he still has significant game design duties. Our lead designer is Jeff Brown, a video game veteran most recently with Activision, with several games for Super Nintendo, Sega, and Playstation under his belt. Mark Simon and Dan Kading are new to the profession of game design but not new to the business; Mark was the lead tester on Abe’s Exoddus, while Dan was a programmer on that same project. Frank Simon, who was the producer on our previous Oddworld titles, will be joining us full-time as a game designer in the new year, bringing a wealth of game and production experience to the day-to-day tasks of putting the game together.

I am Paul O’Connor, and after serving as lead designer on Oddworld’s first two games, I’ve been kicked upstairs to senior game designer. I’ve designed all sorts of games since my first publication back in 1980, including paper and pencil role playing games, miniatures games, board games, computer games, and video games.

[The section below was originally published in the Italian magazine Super Consoleand has been translated into English by GPT]

What Does a Designer do?

We cover a lot of roles and not everyone at the Department have the same assignments. Here's a series of tasks that typically belong to a Game Designer listed in no particular order:

• Write a document describing the game's action under any point of view
• Make a technical documentation of controls system.
• Formulate a game's mechanic based on the narrative's elements of the project
• Edit game's environments using 3D modelling software
• Propose ideas and game's mechanics to higher ups
• Work with programmers to refine controls system and shots
• Work with the artists to create simple visualization of essential game information (in short, the GUI)
• Keep track of the big picture while the experts work on the single details... Be the one that knows how to put all together in a way that can make it work
• Write manuals and suggestions
• Keep an eye on the other software houses and valuate the potential competitor games.
• Create and keep updated our database , the keeper of every game's element descriptions
• Design puzzles and other tests on paper before implementing them throughout the game's editor
• Write the text for tutorial's descriptions screens
• Test the game and delete bugs
• Make a model system for the sophisticated interactions between climate conditions, creatures and industrial installments
• Conceive original solutions to problems fighting with the other Designers to assert your opinion
• Make it Fun!
• Write articles for the best Italian magazine...

and the list goes on...

How Does a Designer Do All That Stuff?

I can't reveal all my secrets all at once! I'll describe how we get the order from the chaos in the next month's article. In the meantime, your comments are welcome! If you have any question send them to the guys at SPC (email address : gamedev@tin.it) and I'll try to reply to you in the next meetings with the Game Dev Diary. Also subjects you want to see being discussed in this space are well accepted too, so if there's a particular aspect of game production that interests you, let me know and I'll try to please you.

Paul O' Connor

12-21-1999