My Design Idiom
Every game designer has his quirks. One of the most important things to do when you become a game designer (or in any job, really) is to figure out what works best for you–how do you produce your best work? For some people, they just push through and work a little at a time. Others work in bursts. Some procrastinate. Whatever it is, it’s important to find out for yourself what works for you. What do I do? I’m glad you asked (read: I’m telling you whether you like it or not)!
My design idiom is a little strange. I have different approaches to every aspect of design I work on, but all of them share some common methods that I’ve determined work best for me. A lot of it seems pretty standard, but there is one unique method I employ. Let’s go through the steps if I’m doing something fairly large in scope (the smaller scope stuff is the same process, but faster).
When I first approach something, I think. A lot. I tend not to put much of anything on paper for a while. In fact, I probably spend an entire day just thinking. How do I think? By screwing around. I jump around to websites, take turns in my online Risk games, play ping pong, and generally do stuff that appears to be me wasting time.
What I’m really doing is two things: First, I’m thinking about what I’m going to do. Second (and for me, more importantly), I’m charging up. I have to gather my energy by messing around and not burn too much fuel on actual work.
After I’ve gathered that energy for a day at work, I head home. This is really where I end up getting the most useful thinking done, especially as I try to get to sleep (after which point I accrue Rest XP… okay, bad analogy). By the end of the day at home, I usually know what I want to do.
The next day at work starts with a burst of notes. I put everything I’ve been thinking about (that I feel will be useful to me, not all the stuff I eliminated already) on paper before lunch. This usually is just a bulleted list that isn’t very organized.
After lunch, I hammer everything into something useful. I take the notes, throw those on the right monitor, and turn them into a coherent document that covers everything necessary for the task at hand (or implement things, depending on what I’m designing). This is generally done by the end of the day.
I almost structured this whole thing as if I were a blacksmith… the thinking being the schematics for what I wanted to make, the notes being the smelting of the ore, the document being the creation of a weapon… but I decided to spare you (mostly).
What does this get me? Well, I’m often very productive even though I look like I’m messing around a lot. A task that is supposed to take me 3 days tends to take me 2 days when I work this way. The company I work for (38 Studios) realizes that every designer has their own way of working, so I don’t take any flack for my methods (what’s important is that you complete your task on time and at a high quality level–how you get there is up to you).
Of course there is iteration after I get feedback from others and such, but this process gets me to the completion of the initial design.
Everything else I do is pretty normal. I usually smack headphones on when I’m in the final phase of designing anything (got some new Sennheiser HD 555s for my birthday, and they rock), like many others do. I tend to go fairly broad first, then drill into the details. Things like that. But that isn’t really part of my personal design idiom, the “how the crap did you finish that already when every time I looked over at you it looked like you were screwing around?” is my design idiom.
Do you have an interesting process you use to produce your best work?
Somehow, I doubt many companies would appreciate your method.
I have to alternate between being among people and being alone. My thinking is much clearer when I’m alone for hours, but I need people to give me the necessary energy and inspiration.
The thinking aspect is a big part of what works for me as well. In previous jobs they wanted us running around constantly. That lead, quite honestly, to shoddy work from me. In my new position I get plenty of room to just sit and ponder. When I get a project I just sit in my chair, lean back, think on it a while and then come up with two plans.
I then argue the two plans out in my head like. It probably sounds a little nutty but it works for me. Side A argues with Side B and when they agree I get to work. I’m a “one shot one kill” sort of fellow so once I start working I don’t stop until the project is complete or I wake up with a face full of keys.
I also compartmentalize a lot. I don’t work general to specific. I start on area 1 and do everything that is related to it, in random order, until it is done. The best part about it is, like you, I’m allowed to do it as I please. As long as I hit my dead lines (and I’ve yet to miss one) nobody cares how I get there.
Frankly, more than once my boss has came to my work area and asked, “Working hard?” and I say “No, screwing around and reading Nerfbat.” He nods and wanders off. That -never- would have happen at my previous job!
I need music. When I am listening to music, and it doesn’t matter what exactly as long as it is not distracting or something I loathe, my head is clear and I can do excellent work. If I am forced to sit in silence, without music, my head is full of the songs I wish I was listening to. I’m singing songs in my head, and there isn’t much room left for thinking in there.
Like you, when I have my music, the initial phases of my work looks like screwing around. I will build entire web pages in my head before ever even creating the file. I’ll tumble it around, think about the logical flow, edit, rerun, see it in my head, and then when I’ve got it working logically, I’ll pound out the entire page or pages in minutes. The result is that my process looks like procrastination. My boss will ask if he can see my work and I’ll tell him no, because there isn’t anything to show him. This will repeat for several days, then one day he’ll ask and I’ll show him the completed product, already bug tested. He’ll make some suggestions for layout and style, I’ll do those in a matter of seconds, while he’s standing there, and be done with it. Then back to music and web surfing, and apparent procrastination.
The only time I ever really sit at the PC banging away at design and code is when I’m doing something I’ve never done before and don’t have the knowledge/experience to do the work in my head.
You’re fired.
Hey, this is a really interesting post!
I have derived my own idiom through about 6 years of working as a software designer, but I actually borrowed the term for it from Chris Crawford (the game designer). He calls it “Letting the ideas percolate”.
You spend about a day or two really studying the problem you are trying to solve, come at it from a dozen different angles, consider all the things you are trying to achieve (ease of use, performance, modularity, customisability etc), come up with a dozen different approaches but don’t actually commit to anything or throw out any ideas. Then after you’ve had an intense brainstorm, you just stop thinking about it (completely), and put it aside for a day or two (or if its really tricky, like the architecture for the next version’s key feature, a week or two). There’s always a dozen other things that need to be worked on in parallel, so that’s never usually a problem.
During the intervening time, after sleeping on it, your subconscious chews on it for you, without you having to think about it. Natural intuition kicks in and just having the ideas in the back of your brain is enough for the hard work to be done for you.
Then, when you come back to it, fresh, the right idea just “pops into your head”. The subconscious mind and intuition eliminates most of the incompatible ideas for you, and often will come up with a new synthesis that sort of makes it all fit. What it really comes down to is trusting your intuition, and changing your workflow to accommodate it.
This actually sounds a lot like your process too, just a different way of approaching it.
In my view the design process is not the idea generating process, which separates the work into very different areas. I’ll have to write a piece on ideas to cover it but I would say something like
idea: an idea is information which has an undetermined value
design: a process which develops value from an idea
The work which is needed to do the design part to create a value depends too much on the idea to be easily identified. But in large it is split between the to poles of being able to execute the design from start to finish without needing communication and needing to communicate through the whole process. I might go far enough to say that the first pole of no communication is probably not what I would call design either.
@Moorgard LOL. That’s great.
My idiom would have to be that I have to work under the pressure of a deadline. Even if that deadline is self imposed. I started my career as a radio news writer and anchor with 1/2 hour deadlines during the busiest times of the day. I think that molded me to work the way I do. It does irritate some of the people around me because they like to feel prepared. My best work, however, is done under pressure.
Don’t get me wrong. I go through a lot of the phases you outline. I do a lot of thinking, plotting, planning. But the most fun to me is beating that deadline and getting something of quality done.
This is a fantastic discussion and I can’t help but jump in.
As someone coming out of college, I’ve spent a strange amount of time thinking about how I come to my best creative thinking. For me, I try to surround myself with things that open my thought process. For me it’s chill music (anything from meditation music to reggae), sunshine (windows open if possible), cooking (this opens up creativity quite well if you’re someone who loathes cookbooks and trusts their own experimentation), and finally sleeping on the problem.
Just before sleeping is when things tend to come together. I try to cut down the amount of speaking that I do over the course of the day. I’ve found that when I’m really working hard to solve a creative problem or working on art, it’s very difficult to switch between speaking and thinking creatively (I suspect that they use very separate areas of the brain).
Interesting thread!
My solution is to always be working on several different tasks at once. I’ve developed this as much out of neccessity as out of choice, as generally the nature of development won’t allow you to focus on just one task if your life depended on it. There’s always someone coming by your cube or emailing you to take a look at something, or a meeting midday on an unrelated topic, or a discussion over lunch.
I used to just try and stay really late to work after everyone had left, but my resolution this new year was to leave earlier and just find a way to pack all that work into the day more effectively.
This whole process is pretty similar to Ryan’s and Chris’s, except I’m trying to squeeze more productivity out of the day by letting those ideas percolate while I’m implementing, attending meetings, or other work that doesn’t take 100% brain power. I also agree with Chris that sleeping on something will often allow things to fall into place. I first noticed this when playing Guitar Hero. Just by virtue of sleeping once after learning a song, I’d always be much better at it than I would be if I just left and came back for awhile.
In general I find juggling tasks to be a great way to solve any problem and avoid burnout or blockage. I play multiple games at once, read multiple books at once, and generally always try to make sure that I have something else to focus on when I start to hit diminishing returns on my current task.
Mike
mikedarga.blogspot.com
I’ll tend to mind-map first. I sit down with a blank sheet of paper, draw a bubble in the middle with a question or title, and then start making notes in every direction, making branches and sub-branches, just brain-dumping everything I can think of with the task at hand. Then I grab a highlighter and start linking related items. From this mess, I’ll make more orderly bullet lists, schematics, or whatever I need.
Strangely, this also works for my writing. I had one page titled “Can [protagonist] jump the span from [one thing to another]?” After filling it up with physics equations, I scribbled at the bottom: “No”, and then pulled out another blank sheet to figure out what to do with the character.
[...] in the industry. I am also curious as to how their work flow is. We already know that they let Ryan lounge around and play ping pong all the time. I have to imagine it isn’t strictly following the previous [...]
Controlled spontaneity. The best writing I’ve ever done is when I’ve spent hours poring over notes, sources, all the detail crap that you need to include and trying to get that lodged in my brain. I won’t write a sentence, a paragraph…the whole writing structure of “Intro, Body, body…” is a load of crap. Get it situated in your brain as much as possible and then just get your thoughts out. Most of the time I didn’t even come up with an argument that I wanted to write until I finished the first paragraph.
My English teachers hated this. So do my bosses…hmmmm…
What continually amazes me is how business managers will consistently ignore factual studies on workplace productivity. I worked for a fortune 20 company that was asked by Standford university to participate in a productivity study. They let a specific segment of workers telecommute for a 1 year period. After the results were examined they realized there were significant increases in productivity and employee morale. Employee’s were actually putting in more hours on projects from home then they did at work.
What did they do when they study was completed? All those people had to stop telecommuting and went back to their prior work schedule.
Even for graphics design, I find this to be … pretty similar to my methods. I get someone asking me for a new logo or website and I let them “throw up” all over me w/ their ideas while I internally am horrified, but listen – I do. There is usually, always a way to encorporate all of that splatter into the design, whatever it is that is needing my graphic design focus. Then, there’s lots of browsing around the internet looking at the same things that I’ve looked at a hundred times over in between idle chatter through 15 different instant message windows and lots of checking my email on my iphone and gmail (note – the email account is the same. Serious productivity going on here!) and finally I start to get the feeling that the dang thing is taunting me, so I try to turn it entirely off in my head and do something completely different and hopefully random.
Then I go home. Eventually either I’ll be in the shower, looking but not finding an article of clothing that I’m looking for, or attempting to fall asleep and then I get the hit. BAM it all comes at once.
If I don’t get the hit, then I start “doodling” in illustrator. Really, I’m just trying things on for size, and somehow the pieces all just fall together. The hit happens mid-design, I scrap what I’m doing, and go w/ what I almost can see that I have in my mind and then widdle it until its perfect. Then I throw it to the wolves of people who know I won’t cry when they tear my design to shreds, and then I widdle some more and eventually – I’m satisfied enough to send to someone.
And they’re usually surprised that it only took 2 or 3 days… if the world is working normally. Sometimes I get thrown into some crazy timewarp where nothing creative happens and then… well. Then I need the crap scared out of me by a deadline. That’ll get the creative juices flowing *cough*