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I'm afraid "I play a lot of games" isn't a job qualification, sorry.

But it should be one of the key factors. I doubt there is many rock singers who listen only to rap music, teachers who don't have any education at all, cooks who don't try food made by other people, car designers who rarely using cars, etc. No theoretical education will give you the expirience of how real game looks and feels like, and since there is many various games out there (and some, like survivals or fightings need hundred of hours spent before you can try out all content they have to offer) - you need A LOT of time spent in games before you will know all the possibilities they have to offer.

If you don't have that kind of expirience:

- You will not know about how players react to certain feature before you spent time and money to test it

- You will repeat mistakes already made by other developers because you have no idea about them

- You will miss an exellent opportunities that may come out of inspiration from another gameplay mechanics

- You will proudly announce "the feature that you never expirienced before" when it was already being implemented in 5 various games

- You will not know the trends - genres and types of gameplay that are overused and make players sick when they see yet another one, genres that are in need of a new game atm, etc.

- You will repeat annoying cliches and other overused types of storytelling, that don't even change from one game to another.

And there is a lot more to add, but the most important part here is that your games will be made in sort of informational vacuum, when you rely on very limited sourses of expirience (maybe you tried most popular games in the genre), and disregarding everything else. Honestly, i never saw a good game being build with that kind of approach, because the best expirience is the practical expirience.

I don't say that just because i played a lot of games i should be instantly hired in the industry. But expirience and understanding of your craft was never concidered a bad part of resume, right?

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He started at the bottom as a designer - not someone just pitching random ideas from the outside.

It seems like you think that i want to just give them my concept and say "good luck on making the game", when in reality i want to go all the way to the release, including working as a designer. But just a game designer, and not visual designer, level designer, etc, because i know my limitations too well.

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It doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is commercial viability.

Sorry, are you serious now?

People making a plane. Sunndely, the company responcible for finansing the whole thing says "finish the work, and it does not matter if it has only one engine and one wing, and also most of the systems aren't even tested yet", then plane crushes into the ground.

Your conclusion on this - "planes are bad in general".

ElvenNeko,

You need to post your stories and concepts online and show people why they should care about your ideas. Proclaiming you know the answers, but not showing them to people, does nothing to help your situation. In fact, it does the opposite in some cases.

For example, I always visit this site when I need inspiration. If I was starting a game company, I'd be targeting guys like him... https://androidarts.com/

Now go make an online presence, showing off your dedication to the craft. You can't just sit on ideas and expect things to happen.

19 hours ago, ElvenNeko said:

But it should be one of the key factors. I doubt there is many rock singers who listen only to rap music, teachers who don't have any education at all, cooks who don't try food made by other people, car designers who rarely using cars, etc.

Don't twist their words. Nobody is saying that game designers should not play any games. They are saying that "playing too many games" does not make you a better game designer than "playing a normal amount of games".

Think about it: will eating a lot of food make you a cook? No, it will only make you fat Eating different kinds of food may help, but the most important thing is actually cooking. Without cooking things yourself, all the eating in the world will not make you a cook. 

Game development is very similar: the work in designing and developing games is different than the work in playing the games. So in your case, "I have made a game (and released it for free on Steam)" is way more valuable than "I play games for 70 hours per week".

21 hours ago, ElvenNeko said:

Sorry, are you serious now?

People making a plane. Sunndely, the company responcible for finansing the whole thing says "finish the work, and it does not matter if it has only one engine and one wing, and also most of the systems aren't even tested yet", then plane crushes into the ground.

Your conclusion on this - "planes are bad in general".

No, there you go again putting words in my mouth that I never said.

What I did say is exactly what you quoted: what matters is commercial viability. You are clearly ignorant of how the games industry works and you're sounding like a typical gamer who thinks "oh, evil publishers, they always ruin games". But the fact is that the publisher is not a bottomless well of cash that can just keep funding a development studio forever. They will have predictions of how many sales they're going to make based on the audience size, and they can't just throw an extra year at a underperforming development team unless they are confident the sales will cover that extra year of costs. They didn't just decide "hey, let's stop development early". The development was running well over budget and was doing badly. The team are lucky that the publisher didn't just pull the plug entirely. Games are expensive to make. Games that run well over budget are not commercially viable.

For this reason, publishers and developers only tend to pick external IP that is likely to increase the audience size for the game, allowing for increased projected revenue and therefore more scope for development time. This is why they never just pick random stories pitched by inexperienced writers.

21 hours ago, ElvenNeko said:

It seems like you think that i want to just give them my concept and say "good luck on making the game", when in reality i want to go all the way to the release, including working as a designer. But just a game designer, and not visual designer, level designer, etc, because i know my limitations too well.

I'm glad that you've got some reasonable expectations. But there's no such thing as "just" a game designer - working as a game designer almost always involves some technical and/or visual work, at least at lower levels. That's the nature of the job. I know some 'narrative designers' at local game companies and they worked up from 'level designer'.

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They are saying that "playing too many games" does not make you a better game designer than "playing a normal amount of games".

And how is lack of knowledge on a subject of your work does not make you worse at it?

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Think about it: will eating a lot of food make you a cook?

No, but if you haven't tried anything except what's served in the nearest cafeteria, i doubt you have what it takes to become one of the greatest master chiefs in the world. You haven't tasted the absolute majority of food and have no idea what ingridients other people may use to make it better, so you have to either stick to the few most common recepies you know, or figure them out on your own. Instead of various spices he always puts salt or whatever he can find in nearest supermarket, instead of exquisite food he serves you fast food because he does not know better. Or maybe even worse: you just put a random spices without knowing how they taste and hope it will work, if not - you just do it again, and again, trying to blindly quess the right option. Knowledge could help to avoid that.

I am pretty sure that's exacly how Culling 2, Islands of Nyne, Fear the Wolves, Radical Heights and Fractured Lands were born - "Oh, everyone loves this dish, so i think i shoud make the same! What? What does it mean "everyone had enough of this"? What do you mean "you don't understand why people like them"? My dish looks alike, isn't that enough?".

What miracles could i do if i got a budget of any of those games...

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But the fact is that the publisher is not a bottomless well of cash that can just keep funding a development studio forever.

So you have no idea what exacly happened with vampires. Reading wiki for commonly know information is not enough (and that is the proof to the statement above).

Publisher wanted to make their game a first game on Sourse engine to be released, despite it being in beta and Valve did not provide dev's with many nessesary fixes before it officialy released, so they had to work on the engine without even proper support from it's developer. And, ironically - Valve forbid to release a game before Hl2 comes out, and publishers didn't care that something like HL2 could outshadow some almost unknown rpg, and forced them to make a release in same day despite game didn't even gone trough the proper testing (so before first patches it could not even be finished). That's how greed and stupidity of publisher that could not wait at least for an extra week or two doomed the financial sucsess of one of the most highly-rated rpg's. As writer of that game said - most players even had no idea about game being released. They literally throw all the money they spent to develop this game to the trash bin with their own decicion, they had one job and they failed it, that shows how unprofessional they were as a publisher.

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For this reason, publishers and developers only tend to pick external IP that is likely to increase the audience size for the game

So this is why there is never a shortage of original ip's out there? Even some of current big series like Assasin's Creed were a new ip at some point, that aren't based on anything but some history and a lot more imagination.

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But there's no such thing as "just" a game designer - working as a game designer almost always involves some technical and/or visual work, at least at lower levels.

If you want to have more control over the game - sure. But not all people are Kojima multi-functional, capable of learning multiple trades. And if you look at the titles for almost any game - there is a seperate specialist for each type of technical work - that's because people who are great at everything are a rarity, and it's a lot better if everyone in team will do what he does best. You know why the survival game Miscreated isn't dead yet despite a lot of competition and now being sucsessfull (and heavily criticized) in many gameplay mechanics? They have amazing level designer, who made one of the best looking worlds and atmospheric worlds in survival games, and he is the main reason of this game still being afloat. They also have a game designer, but i really doubt that he takes part in level design, because why should he, if they have a real professional for this job?

On 7/10/2019 at 2:52 PM, Gnollrunner said:

I was specifically responding to the quote. But I'll go father and say that spending excessive amounts of time playing computer games can be highly detrimental to your life and well being.

I agree, but what exactly would here mean the excessive amount? 16 h / day ?