Overtime and overbudget is actually a positive sign :

LA Noire is a hugely ambitious open world game of the type very few people in the Oz industry have worked on. Hugely ambitious open world games share some common characteristics – they’re always late, they’re always over budget, and the entire team always crunches like mad throughout. Every GTA from 3 onwards has been late and over budget (in fact, it’s fair to say that’s true of almost every Rockstar game full stop), the same is true of projects I’ve been personally closer to (like Mercenaries 2, The Saboteur or the cancelled Batman game).

I can definitively say that no-one has yet shipped a large open world game easily on their first outing. Direct sequels (that don’t move to a new platform or reinvent the genre) are easier, but still not easy. In general, I don’t think people in the broad game community understand the additional complexity of building open world games with emergent and supporting systems over building classic linear games. Fans have close to no idea, and even developers are prone to massively underestimate the challenge.

Still, there is at least one company that understands this exceptionally well. They’ve built multiple massively successful open world games and continue to define the benchmark of what an open world game can achieve. That company is Rockstar, and they’re not only the open world experts, they’re very canny businessmen and marketers. Dan Houser is one of the most switched on producers I’ve ever met, which means if Rockstar are betting on Team Bondi I’m inclined to support that bet, evidence otherwise notwithstanding.

The thing about going over budget is that it’s actually a statement of support of the project – in order to get more money, you need to convince people that it’s worthwhile to continue. In this case, Team Bondi seem to have the support of Rockstar – a company that understands that one of the biggest obstacles to greatness in open world games is releasing too early. That has to be seen as a good sign, not a portent of disaster.

Crunch time and overwork :

Long, sustained crunch isn’t my thing. I’m not a fan of it for my studio or any teams I’ve ever led. In the long term I believe it loses more productivity than it gains. I’ve never shipped a 90+ open world game, though. The fact of the matter is, inside the industry, we know that’s how those games are made. Rockstar SanDiego was the latest example as they crunched to ship Red Dead Redemption. People go to studios making games this way because they want to ship an acclaimed title and they understand (at least they should if they’ve done their research) what is involved. The flipside is, they then gain a golden ticket to work anywhere else in the industry they choose. Once you have a GTA4 or Call of Duty under your belt, the world is your oyster. People make that trade off consciously.

One of the flip sides of long development times and frequent crunch is high staff turnover. This can be a killer for a studio that needs to maintain a high quality benchmark over time, especially in a city as starved for game dev talent as Sydney. Nonetheless, I say that crunch isn’t necessarily a sign the game will be bad (although it does likely mean Team Bondi will lose some staff to greener pastures once the game has shipped).

Threats of Studio Closure :

A lot of people seem to be worried the studio will close. That seems unlikely at this point in time, as LA Noire is far enough progressed that it will certainly make more money than it takes to complete. This relates to sunk costs and the manner in which new investments are calculated – all the money already spent has been spent, and it won’t come back no matter what you do. All you can do now is calculate how much more you need to spend (lets say it’s $8 million) and whether you’ll make that back when you release the title. Sure, you may not get back all of the sunk costs ($25 Mil?) but if you can spend $8 million today to make $20 million tomorrow you’re still better off than if you cancelled the project today.

This is the way publically traded companies approach this sort of question, with the additional complication that if they’ve mentioned the project in their earnings calls they have to explain to shareholders why they’ve cancelled it. In case you’re wondering, that’s not great for shareprices, so it’s something they tend to avoid.

For both these reasons, I doubt very much the studio will face closure. If that was going to happen, it would happen before the announced delay (and thereby extra money they’ll have paid out to the developer). Despite what Anon said in the Tsumea comments, it’s exceptionally rare for announced projects to get shut down late in the cycle – when it happens, it happens because everyone understands they’re not actually late in the cycle (ie, it’s clear there’s no way they’ll ship when they claim).

What if it’s a decent success? :

LA Noire doesn’t have to be a smash hit to put Team Bondi on track to be the most important studio in Australia. It really just needs to be okay enough to allow them to build a sequel. The most important thing for a studio like their is to build on the technology and knowledge they’ve built in order to move on to their next project. There are few teams in the world that can build truly great open world games – it would be fantastic for Australian development if Team Bondi became one of those studios.

Of course, all this said, everything could go the same way Realtime Worlds did. None of us know for sure. What I don’t understand is why everyone in Australia seems to be wishing for their failure, when with the limited knowledge we have to hand we could as easily anticipate success.

Firstly it will result in many (nearly all) titles simply not being released in this territory, meaning that one of the great appeals of the iPhone (having access to a large amount of content easily) will go away. Very few developers will be willing to pay extra to gain access to the Australian market on the possibility that they may be able to recoup their money. Iphone development is a very hit and miss affair, and this proposal just makes misses an order of magnitude more expensive.

Secondly, this will have a brutal impact on local development. Developers will have to choose either to take the risk and pay the costs, or simply release their games everywhere else except Australia. Australian developers rely on Australian audiences to help them build global brands. Products like Fruit Ninja gain local attention and then use that to spread their wings internationally, with great success.

Certainly that was the case with Cluck It! for us. It’s initial release was spread throughout our (primarily local) networks, which helped us gain the attention we needed to get featured on the local app store. From there, we rapidly spread internationally, gaining tens of thousands of new customers from around the world.

This really seems like a case of the government acting at cross purposes to itself. On one hand, we had state and federal representatives present at this weekends excellent Freeplay conference advising independent developers how to gain government support for their initiatives. On the other, we have Brendan O’Connor making statements that potentially put the (currently thriving) local independents at risk.

This piece is aimed at traditional media producers who are looking to make the move into making games, of one sort or another. The games industry of today is incredibly exciting, and it needs people of all stripes to help build incredible and inspiring content. Here are some guidelines before you dive into the new world!

Rule Zero : Games are not movies.

I went to SeaWorld not that long ago, and they had a ride called Bermuda Triangle. In a lot of ways, it felt like someone who really wanted to make a movie had been put in charge of building a ride. There was a whole bunch of narrative, and backstory as you floated through a series of caves filled with amazing set pieces. Visually gorgeous as you see all the missing spitfires and other elements that have gotten lost in the Triangle. The big problem (aside from meeting aliens around the next corner) is that the ride is no fun. It’s supposed to end with a race against time as the whole cave system collapses and you barely escape. It’s not thrilling, or exciting, or compelling. On the other hand Seaworld also has a ride called Jet Rescue which is supposed to be about rescuing animals on JetSkis. You sit down, there’s a brief bit of video from the head of marine stuff, and then the acceleration blows your face off and you rocket around a track getting flipped nearly upside down.

Jet Rescue is a much better ride, because its primary focus is on being a good ride. Rides aren’t movies, and a good movie doesn’t necessarily make a good game. The same is true (incredibly true) of games. You can fill a game with beautiful set pieces and backstory and aliens … and it can still be a terrible game. On the other hand, blocks falling from the sky can be incredibly addictive. Why do the blocks fall in Tetris? Who knows? Who cares?

Rule 1 : Play Games

You need to play games, if you want to make them. I’ve seen a lot of game projects arise, for one reason or another, from people who say sometime like this :

“I want to make a game. I don’t play them, because they’re such a degenerate waste of time, but I know how to make a really good one.”

The funny thing about this is that I hear it a lot. If you said the same thing to a film director, they’d laugh at you, and with good reason. To really understand the artform, you need to engage with it. Play games a lot, learn about what you enjoy, and take notes. By the way, watching your kids play games doesn’t count. Games are about what you do, first and foremost. What you watch and listen to comes in second place, and if that’s all you understand then you still don’t get it. It’s the same as reading the novelisations of great movies and being convinced you understand the film anyway.

It’s important enough to say it again. Games are about what you do. GTA is about driving and shooting. Tetris is about putting blocks in place. Pac-Man is about avoiding ghosts and eating dots. Call of Duty is about shooting and ducking into cover. Each of these games may have a whole bunch more stuff going on, but they’re games because of what you do in them.

Rule Two : Interaction comes first. Way first.
There are a huge number of reasons to be excited about games. I’m excited about games, incredibly so. If you’re thinking about transmedia, then I presume you’re excited about games. So it’s all good, right?

Except in many cases that’s not really the case. There’s a lot of people who want to do transmedia because they feel like they should, or because it makes it easier to tell stories, or because they read something on a blog. Games are about interaction, not about narrative in the conventional sense. If you don’t have an interaction you’re excited about, you don’t have a game. If the core of your excitement is the story you want to tell, make a movie. Write a book! A story is not a game idea, even if you think it might be. It’s a theme for a game, and that’s a completely different thing. Come back to games when you have something to offer games – which means you need to consider the actions the player can take, and the implications of those actions.

Rule Three : Narrative is context for action.

One of the great opportunities for narrative in games is as context for action. Action with context is substantially more meaningful than action without. Thus, if you’re considering getting into games from a traditional media background, odds are you’re probably a pretty experienced good storyteller, and that’s a skill you can definitely bring to bear here.

I always use GTA as the example here. Almost every mission in GTA in about driving or shooting. Sometimes shooting then driving, or driving then shooting then driving some more. However, because each mission is arranged in interesting ways and is given context by the greater narrative, people continue to play through tens of hours of the same sorts of mechanics. Narrative gives action context and that can be a great boon.

Rule Four : Gameplay is a loop, not a line.

A good gameplay loop (and a nice litmus test for whether you’ve got the game bit or the narrative bit in mind), is whether it has an in built ability to renew and refresh itself. Driving along the road in a driving game against the same five cars is fun for a bit, but once you let me upgrade and add to my car, and progressively increase the challenge of the tracks and the skills of the driver, you’ve got a game. The core mechanic (driving) let me compete (races) where success rewards me (cash) which I can use to gain additional skills and abilities (upgrade) so that I can (driving) better and win new (races) and get more (cash) and (upgrade) and (driving) and on and on.

Rule Five : There are more ways to play Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Not everyone will find the above gameplay loop compelling. Different things motivate different people at different times. If you want to build a mass market game, you need to develop a broadly appealing suite of options that engage different people in different ways.

The world of games includes everything from WiiFit (a game about getting stronger and thinner each day) to Facebook (a game about having a lot of friends and “liking” the things they do). Interactivity is a broad church, with plenty of space for everything from the Call of Duty and World of Warcraft end of the table through to games that can teach, or touch, or inspire. Different games take different approaches, and appeal to different people, and you can learn a lot by looking into what’s out there.

Rule Six : Build and Test, Build and Test

How do you learn about these different players and play styles, the masses of niches that make up your market? Watch them play games. Not just your games, but any old games. But your games too. Please make sure that you watch people play your games. Resist the urge to explain things to them, or help them. Whenever you open your mouth to help someone through your game, your game just lost. You won’t be there to help when the game goes out to the public, so you need to ensure that it can speak for itself. Fix those things and try again, until people can flow through your experience as seamlessly as possible. There are a million ways to entice and seduce people into learning the way your game operates, and you’ll only learn them by watching what people do. You need to understand what your game does well, and encourage people to do that.

Rule Seven : Who is your player, and what do you want to do to them?

Games are capable of providing an enormous range of emotion and experience, yet most commercial games stick to a relatively narrow niche. Action, suspense and the satisfaction of collecting shiny things. In order to really craft a great experience for people, you need to begin with a goal in mind. Understand what it is you want to do, and you’ll be well placed to achieve it.

Rule Eight : Don’t trust anyone who tries to make rules.

Game designers can’t resist making rules. It’s what we do. As true as that is, the whole world of games is barely nascent medium. There are no hard and fast rules, nor are there any guarantees for success. All of the rules I’ve listed are guidelines at best, ways to check that you’ve thought about what you want to build and considered the ways you can make that a success. If you want to throw them away, throw them away!

The only important thing, in the end, is to be passionate about games. As a new medium, there’s an incredible amount of trail yet to be blazed, and that’s incredibly exciting. Any rule made today could be irrelevant tomorrow, and the opportunities are endless. Make games. Build rules. Watch people play. Make new games. Bring something new into the world. Now there’s a gameplay loop I can believe in!

Then in August (14th-15th) I’ll be on a panel at Freeplay (and possibly chairing one as well). It’s all about the many ways in which play is spreading out to every aspect of the world around, which is one of my pet topics. Can’t wait to follow that one up!

Both of those take place in Melbourne, but for those at home I’ll be speaking in Brisbane later in the year (September 20-23rd) at the World Computer Congress, which I’m looking forward to. That’s a wider audience, so I’ll be covering the incredibly varied state of games as they are at the moment.

Hope to see you at some or all!

How can that be? Customer focus is good, right? Except in this case, not so much. Customer focus has paralysed Reddit and put them in a near impossible situation. Many internet businesses hit this point as they grow – a pivot point that lies between simply growing their user base by catering to a desire/need of a group of users and making decisions about how to grow into a sustainable business. As the skills and behaviors required for each stage are different lots of companies reach that turning point and have a great amount of difficulty making the transition.

I remember working for Alex Garden at Relic, and one of the things that really impressed me was that he was able to work out when his early approach, the one that got the company off the ground and created Homeworld, was no longer useful to the growth of the company. He hired a couple of great people to run the business side, and slowly backed away from the day to day running of the company. Of course, that also meant that he got bored and began to follow other dreams, but it also meant that Relic grew into the strong developer that could give us Company of Heroes and Dawn of War.

In this case, it seems like Reddit has adopted a policy of not making any changes that would offend the userbase. So they make no changes at all, because the userbase isn’t a single individual, with likes and dislikes whose whims can be catered to. No. The userbase is made up of a mass of individuals and niche groups, each one with it’s own preferences and biases. There is literally no action Reddit can take that will not cause offence to some substantial portion of it’s customer base.

Bam. Stasis. Change meets with anger from a vocal userbase, so no change ever happens. Only the status quo is safe.

Reddit has painted itself into a corner, and especially so now. They’re no longer in charge of their own destiny, they’re driven by users. Users who most certainly do not have Reddit’s best interests in mind. As everyone knows, the surest way to make sure no decision is made is to form a committee. Reddit has this problem writ as large as possible. No matter what they do now, if it represents movement, there will be a public outcry. For fear of weathering that outcry, they do nothing. Doing nothing means eventual, slow, death.

The irony here of course, is that it’s precisely the users voices that has made Reddit strong through the first phase of their growth. It’s those voices (and the traffic they generate) that represent the unique asset Reddit has in the market. Without users, Reddit is nothing. To look to the future however, Reddit needs to make decisions that will undoubtedly anger some of those users, in order to better serve the rest.

What does this have to do with games? In a lot of ways, this is the same problem that can overtake large game companies with strong public fanbases. A sense of entitlement from the userbase means that even small changes are met with rabid online hysteria. The thing that key game studios have learned (and Reddit can profit from understanding) is that this hysteria does not necessarily represent the actual BEHAVIOR of their users. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t – and the only way to be sure is to try it and see.

For example, Blizzard is well known for not making key game design decisions (lets not touch RealID here, for a host of reasons) on the basis of their forums. If they did, they’d have to improve and nerf pretty much every character class simultaneously. Read a character forum, and everyone thinks their particular class is being hard done by. If you’re looking to gather an understanding of peoples subjective experience, forum information is great. However, if you want to balance the game, you need to look at the objective information – who wins and loses in PVP, how effective is this character in various scenarios, and so forth. Fortunately, this data is something Blizzard has access to enormous amounts of – and it figures into their decision making process substantially.

As another example of just how much these online perfect storms generally don’t reflect eventual user behavior, there was a huge furore over COD : Modern Warfare 2 and it’s lack of dedicated servers. It was the biggest news across a host of gaming sites for months, and people promised boycotts left right and center. Below, you can see the impact of the Steam boycott group, shortly after the games release.

Hypocrisy in action : the worlds least successful boycott.

Given that COD:MW2 went on to be the highest selling game of all time up until that point, you can’t argue that the users behavior reflected the intensity of their claims.[1]

The real key to this piece is that there’s a simple way out of this problem for Reddit – however, it’s going to inevitably annoy some users. Placed against this outcome, the slow death of Reddit is a far worse situation for the great majority of users. So the people running the site need to take a step back from firefighting, and make some decisions about the long term direction and sustainability of Reddit. Most importantly, they need to be prepared to make some people unhappy in order to build the Reddit of the future. That means taking seriously a vision for a Reddit that’s financially sustainable and capable of growth. That doesn’t mean one that loses what’s best about Reddit today, but it does mean understanding what that is and nurturing it.

To be absolutely clear – doing nothing to make Reddit profitable, for fear of making some users unhappy, will absolutely and categorically destroy Reddit in the long terms. Making hard decisions and deciding what sort of community they want to build into the long term is the only way they’ll build something that’s right for the majority of their users.

The wonder of the internet, of course, is that users who happen to be unhappy with the new world order will represent a great opportunity for the next people who come along with a great idea on how to build a community. They’ll migrate there, and provide a strong evangelical userbase, which will attract new users until the whole thing suffers under it’s own weight … and then the cycle of life repeats itself.

An additional edit :

So, Reddit has announced they’ve got 6000 gold users and counting, and that makes their appeal a solid gold success. They may be right, but it really doesn’t change my perspective above. The trouble with this approach is that they’re now falling into the trap of doing what’s convenient (catering to the 6000+ with new features and building something like the Total Fark model) rather than setting a plan for how they want Reddit to develop and going there. They’re merely grasping at opportunities as they approach, rather than being strategic. I repeat again what I said above – this isn’t actually to the benefit of the greatest number of their users. Focusing on the sustainable business and userbase they desire would serve them best – and the majority (although not every one of) their users, too.

[1] It’s worth pointing out that Activision has done themselves some long term damage to their brand as a side effect of this decision. Exactly how much damage remains to be seen.

If you’re interested in getting an overview of the dramatic changes the games industry has gone through, and the opportunities that will create – this is the talk for you!  Hope to see you there!

Exciting times, working on projects that thrill me, and hopefully building new strength in the Aussie industry. Here’s to the future!

Day one of the new studio

I wonder if that’s true, however.  One of the things we’re good at is unravelling complexity, and there’s a satisfaction that comes with working things out that is deeply embedded in the human psyche.  It seems to me the more I look at complexity (even wanton, needless complexity) the more it can offer a sense of learning and collective experience that in fact enhances the experience of play.  Perhaps elegance isn’t always the optimum goal?

Sports offer a great example of games with complex and esoteric rule sets.  The Australian Open is on at the moment, and offers a great reminder of the inherent zaniness of the rules of tennis.  If you’ve got no points, that’s called love.  Scores go love-15-30-40 and then game.  Unless both people have 40 points, then that’s deuce.  First to six games wins, unless they both get to five, then you keep playing.  Which is the same mechanic as deuce, but with a different name (not very elegant, that).  You play three sets, unless you play five.  That’s not even getting into more esoteric elements, like challenging decisions, the role of the umpire, foot faults and so forth.  Once you have all of those “basics” clearly understood, then you can start looking at the actual gameplay that takes place underneath them – positioning, choice of shots, and ability to make the shots one wants.  This is for tennis, which is one of the simpler of the mass audience sports.  Lets not even start on baseball stats or american football plays.

The interesting thing about all of the inelegance that hangs around the sporting world is that, although it does raise the barrier to entry for people new to the sport, it also gives people a shared language and experience.  Once you’ve crossed the threshold of knowledge, you have meaningful minutiae of detail to discuss with other fans.  In this case, complexity works for you, not against you.

Over in video games, we can see complexity working in the favor of everything from RPG’s, to the ever escalating systems present in FPS’s.  In fact, genre’s of games regularly add complexity to previous games in the series or genre, on the assumption that a large element of their audience is familiar with what came before.  This can work well (adding RPG progression to FPS multiplayer) or can eventually reduce your audience to a small number of experts, who continue to demand harder and more complex scenarios that alienate newcomers (like the various bullet-hell shooters).

Gameplay goes from this ...

To this crazed example of why they call them bullet hell games!

Let’s look at one of the triumphs of complexity, the Pokemon series.  Not only are the game systems composed of a bunch of relatively esoteric relationships (check out the grid below to see how different types of Pokemon interact) the games grew more complex as they proceeded.  Coming into Pokemon late in the series required a huge amount of learning, because it was assumed that you’d played and understood the predecessors.  Nonetheless, once you’ve climbed that hill, there’s an immense satisfaction and sense of community – and it gives you something to discuss with other Poke-heads the following day.

If you think this is complex, try understanding optimal use of effort values. It makes the Spiderman Clone saga look simple.

So, while in any discussion about game design you’re always going to get someone who wants to find the absolute simplest solution to any problem, effectively devolving every game into a Go-like Platonic perfection, there’s lots of reasons to embrace complexity of systems and interactions.  While complexity alone isn’t going to make your game interesting, feel free to explore the spaces where it can add to what you’re doing.  This was certainly one of the strong points when we developed the character creator for Freedom Force.  It was the initial goal (let people create their own superheroes, and make sure they can build just about anybody) that opened the flood-gates in terms of complexity.  While we tried to keep the systems as simple as possible (with varied success) too clean a solution would have stopped people building heros that played and felt like the heros they were familiar with.  In the end, we jury rigged and special cased around the existing systems to try and be as complete as possible – and ended up with a system that was one of the best parts of the game.

Fundamentally, I agree with that guy who said “games are a series of interesting decisions,” – complexity allows for additional axes of interesting decisions to be made, and therefore offers opportunities for people to learn, engage, and discuss the systems you’ve built.  Elegant systems are a great virtue, but they’re only part of the picture.

One of the main points made in Gladwell’s article is that the same is true of teachers – and the impact that a good teacher can make on their students is exceptional. I won’t try and suggest that good designers are as important as teachers – but they can and will make a substantial impact on the quality of what can be a multimillion dollar project. It’s worth trying to find great ones.

Yet, having sat through a lot of interviews (on both sides of the table) I’ve been largely surprised at the lack of precision involved in hiring designers. In fact, the higher the position being hired for, the less substantial the process seems – ultimately boiling down to hiring creative directors without requiring a design test of any kind.

Even so, is the traditional design test a great tool for finding good designers? For people who haven’t had to do one, most companies ask prospective designers to fill out a design test. It’s basically a document that asks the candidate to write up a spec for an example level (usually a level in the game or sort of game they’ll be working on). At Pandemic, we used the first Destroy All Humans! as our example for the design test, and asked people to design a mechanic, ask how they would bind together the saucer and on foot mechanics, then ask them to develop a weapon and scenario for the game, along with asset lists.

Now, this is a good representation of one of the tasks a designer will regularly need to do – documentation and nice logical spec designs are crucially important to ensuring that tasks begin nicely. As I’ve worked in software development over the years however, it’s become clear that this is really only the beginning of the job of a designer – and in many ways, it’s the easiest part.

Where a great designer really shows their chops is in their ability to simplify and convey the goals of the game, to implement exciting play, to respond to user testing and build things better, and to work with everyone else needed to get those elements into the game. This ability to collaborate and respond to the experiences players have while engaging with the things you’ve built (and to put yourself into the players shoes in advance) are much harder elements to test.

So what’s the best response? One of the suggestions is to throw the gates wide open, and see who pans out. That seems like a good idea (and one I’m at least partially in favor of) but it can be very difficult to put into practice under the normal time pressure of game development. Generally speaking, you’ll need to find designers and ship a game with them over the course of two years – and it’s hard to simply hire 20 people with the intent of cutting them down to 5 after a few months. That approach may fly in financial services, but it’s not so easy in game development – especially as the cost (in terms of the resources of the rest of the team training up new staff) of each new hire is highest during those first few months.

My first suggestion is that it’s absolutely key to know what you’re looking for. This sounds simple, but my experiences tend to suggest it’s almost unheard of with designers. People are looking for someone who comes across well during the interview, or who can talk about games, or who has nice hair … it’s rare that a studio has a codified set of requirements that outline exactly what they’re looking for.

So first, determine what makes a good designer for your studio. Every studio works slightly (or extremely) differently, so the requirements you have will differ. At Pandemic, I was hiring designers on the following criteria :

1. Collaboration : We had an extremely high focus on working with the team to achieve goals, and our designers were the ones ultimately responsible for putting assets into the game. So a key part of their job would be working with the artists to make sure it looked right, and the programmers to make sure it worked right. For our team, collaboration was a must.

2. Responsibility : Related to the above, we needed to find people who would take responsibility for the things they were working on. On our team, designers were both the first port of call and the last responsible for anything in the game – and that meant making sure that we hired people who would take pride in what they implemented. In a lot of ways, this is equivalent to the “Get Things Done” requirement in Joel’s article on hiring.

3. Insight : Understanding how game mechanics work, and what changes have which impacts on the actual game. From insight comes craft – the ability to create elegant structures, to make changes which simplify and improve the game you’re working on.

Now, with those three criteria in hand (while I’m not proposing these as universals, they’re a good start) I set out to try my best to find ways to test for them. It’s not as easy as you might think, and I’m not suggesting there are any magic questions that will give you a positive test as to whether someone has the requirements.

Nonetheless, armed with explicit knowledge of what I was looking for, it became much easier to ask questions and have a conversation around those areas. I can ask which games the candidate has played, and then (providing it’s a game I’m familiar with) we can start to talk about the themes and mechanics. Not only is this one of the things I enjoy, it generally gives me a sense of the way the person thinks about mechanics. In terms of collaboration, I’d ask about past working experiences they’d enjoyed – both to get a sense of what they’d done in the past, and also to see if it involved other people. If so, I’d dig deeper and ask how they worked with those people.

So generally, setting criteria and conversing around them can give a pretty good impression as to whether the people you’re hiring have the basic chops or not.  The key to building a system that works, however, is to add some feedback to it.  As a result, I’d keep notes as we went through each hire, and then return to those six months or a year later and reflect on what had worked, and what hadn’t.  Over time, this allows me to refine and reflect on how the criteria I’ve selected have turned out – and whether it needs any tweaking.

Even with all this in hand, hiring great designers remains somewhat hit and miss – I know some criteria that make it easier to work well in the studio setup we had, and have some ideas as to how to search for people who meet those criteria.  Nonetheless, I was often surprised (and generally pleasantly!) by the new approaches and insight the designers I was fortunate enough to work for brought to the table.  I’m interested in what sorts of approaches other people use – and how that’s working out for them!