Hi everyone,

First off, a little bit about my background: I am currently working as an Analytic Consultant for a market research company in Germany. Before that, my first job after my International Business major was in Marketing for a major music label. I’ve been playing games since the N64 came out, did some graphic modding on Trackmania Nations when it was popular and I am currently playing around with the Overwatch Workshop.

But overall, nothing even remotely comparable to the things you guys are up to.

However, I’ve always been insanely interested in the games industry and while I’m trying to learn more and more of the technical skills (just started my masters in computer science alongside work), I’m still looking for ways to get into the business without necessarily needing many years of practice.

Therefore, I was wondering if there are positions that solely focus on the idea/concept part of a game and if so, are those positions usually filled with people that have many years of GameDev experience?

Would there be a skill set I could develop that enables me to get into those fields without having the technical background?

My other question would be similar but aiming at a Consulting position that does not require any handy-on experience and what would the skill set be?

If you have any other recommendations, I would also highly appreciate it!

Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the answer! Guess I'll jump into Unity or RPG Maker and get going.

On 6/12/2019 at 4:14 AM, Lukke465 said:

I’m trying to learn more and more of the technical skills (just started my masters in computer science alongside work)

This is the good news side of your post.

While the job of "idea man" doesn't exist, the job of "game programmer" is one of many real jobs in the industry.

Start by learning how to take ideas and turn them into practical implementations, and learning the libraries out there to help along the way. Learning how to use Unity or RPG Maker like you proposed can help along that path.

On 6/12/2019 at 1:09 PM, Tom Sloper said:

On 6/12/2019 at 5:14 AM, Lukke465 said:

I was wondering if there are positions that solely focus on the idea/concept part of a game

No. There are not.

I was of that opinion up until 2 years ago when I met someone who was in charge of this. Earlier this year, I've seen a job description (from the same studio) that could really be summed as 'Idea guy' quite honestly. There were some managerial aspect, such as putting this into some kind of a pitch by working with a multi-disciplinary team, but it was really a much different role to the ones I'm used to. I'm still not sure it is a viable one, and I haven't seen it happen at any other studio, and the odds of being employed in such a role with limited experience is quite unlikely, however, it would appear that it 'now exists' in one form of another...

There are "Idea guys" in many game studios but theyre called writers and/or game designers. This is as close to idea man you're going to get and these roles are extremely difficult and require years of experience.

PS: I love seeing Tom Sloper's comments haha just saying No has a certain ring to it.

When people describe "idea guy", the description usually has perhaps only 1% overlap with the actual job of game designer.

Game designers do come up with ideas for games. But that isn't what they do most of the day.  Designers spend time writing boring business documents, working on budgets, attending meetings on just about everything, worrying about staffing, and trying to convince people they can do the impossible. Depending on time within the project's life cycle and size of the product designers spend hours playtesting the game along with QA, helping to work on art along with the art director, doing their best to help improve the code working with tech leads, and working on budgets to try to help make ends meet.  The title of game designer is usually classified as a management position: It is a senior role for a project and one of (typically) three roles that jointly steer the project.

The job people think of as "the idea guy" does not exist at any studio I'm aware of.

The bottom line though is this, the 'idea guy' part of it is not the 'job' part of it, and under most circumstances, a studio has to connect the job description with some profitability stream, which, sadly, being an 'idea guy' simply doesn't correlate to on its own. So I do agree with Tom's assessment, just found the 'no' a bit extreme. The short answer, I think is, 'if there is, it will be a long time before you get to that anyway'.

The bottom line though is this, the 'idea guy' part of it is not the 'job' part of it, and under most circumstances, a studio has to connect the job description with some profitability stream, which, sadly, being an 'idea guy' simply doesn't correlate to on its own. So I do agree with Tom's assessment, just found the 'no' a bit extreme. The short answer, I think is, 'if there is, it will be a long time before you get to that anyway'.

5 hours ago, frob said:

When people describe "idea guy", the description usually has perhaps only 1% overlap with the actual job of game designer.

Game designers do come up with ideas for games. But that isn't what they do most of the day.  Designers spend time writing boring business documents, working on budgets, attending meetings on just about everything, worrying about staffing, and trying to convince people they can do the impossible. Depending on time within the project's life cycle and size of the product designers spend hours playtesting the game along with QA, helping to work on art along with the art director, doing their best to help improve the code working with tech leads, and working on budgets to try to help make ends meet.  The title of game designer is usually classified as a management position: It is a senior role for a project and one of (typically) three roles that jointly steer the project.

The job people think of as "the idea guy" does not exist at any studio I'm aware of.

most of this is just useless prattle, any game designer doing all this is not a game designer(if that makes sense xD). This guy is probably just stroking his ego with this comment.

I understand why people feel this way about the idea guy(among indie devs), it usually represents a slacker, someone with no real technical skill, a leech that benefits from everyone's hard work, etc and i could say more but i think thats enough. Despite all this, the idea guy is usually someone high up in the business, like an investor, founder, sometimes even a director or manager.

The professional idea guy(game designer/ideation expert(writer)) comes in with years of experience working on several projects, theyre responsible for developing many of the documents that describe the game before it makes it to a programmer or artist.

If the Idea guy did not exist, programmers and artists couldnt function properly, theyd all have conflicting ideas and basically nobody would even have an idea of what theyre making.

PS: frob plz dont mute me T_T

PS PS: Programmers are usually the grunts in most software company(games are software just in case you were wondering).