Advice for game design students

My name is Rick van Ginkel, as a game designer I run a small start up called Self Made Miracle along with three friends. We have been working from home as hobbyists for roughly two years before moving into our first, tiny office. As a former Game Design & Development student gone indie I have been reflecting on my time in school a lot and I like to share some well meant advice to those attending various game related schools right now.

Videogames are now more accepted by mainstream society than ever, as a result youngsters are becoming increasingly interested in game development. This results in game design schools accepting an increasing amount of students every year while, part due to the current economical situation, game development companies aren’t hiring a whole lot of juniors.

As I have seen with graduates from my former school many of them end up starting their own companies, working in different fields or not finding jobs at all. If your passion is making games you most likely don’t want to wind up working in a different industry, if you start your own company you will find out it requires a lot more than being a good game designer to succeed and I don’t think any one wants to be unemployed. But fear not, there are several things you can do to improve your chances of becoming a professional in our beautiful industry.

Get connected

No seriously, get connected. As a student I came straight out of middle school and was somewhat reluctant to dive headfirst into a whole new unknown community, turns out I was absolutely wrong. While in school you have the perfect opportunity to get to know people from the industry before you actualy need something from them. Industry vets and starters alike are usually happy to talk about their jobs and struggles to students. Besides learning from their experience, if you stay in regular contact with local and international developers they will eventually remember your name. Our industry is a small world, when the time comes you are looking for a job companies will prefer to hire someone they know over an unknown candidate. If you impress them they might even throw you some freelance work while still in school.

Don’t just limit yourself to other game developers though, many different professionals ultimately contribute to the succes of a game. Marketeers, accountants, community managers, video editors, audio designers, journalists, lawyers and many more, at some point you are likely to need these people especially if you are planning to start your own studio.

Attend exhibitions and conferences most of them have specially low priced tickets available for students. If you think your money is better spent on beer think again, this is your future we are talking about. Besides most conferences end with a bunch of tipsy developers anyway, a great moment to slip them your business card. Dust of that Twitter account and start following fellow designers and developers, tweet about your projects and reply to others. Don’t be afraid you have nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain!

Get practical

I know many game design students dream of becoming genius masterminds of mechanics and lore, I was no different. But in reality an average team has very few designers compared to the amount of developers and most of these designers tend to stay firmly put in their position. Learning how to code enables you to build your own prototypes, reducing the workload of the development team. Grab a copy of Unity 3D or Game Maker and start working out simple ideas into games, before you know it you will be creating advanced, playable prototypes of your own concepts, let me rephrase that; you will actually create your own playable games.

In case coding really isn’t your thing try to excel at other things that might contribute to the game development process such as; creating game assets, making trailers, team management or marketing. Nobody expects an unexperienced junior to be the best specialist on the team, so when looking for specialists companies usually tend to go with more experienced professionals. For any junior designer flexibility is almost a must, companies are much more likely to hire a designer who will reduce the teams workload over one who only increases it. 

Once your hired there will be plenty of time to learn and develop yourself into that specialist you want to be. Incase you want to start your own company anything you can do yourself is saving you a lot of precious money otherwise spent on paycheques for other people.

Get commercial

I believe most game design school graduates know how to make games. It is what they have been taught for the past few years and many of them have probably already been doing so since they were teenagers. As a student all you have to focus on is your game, as a professional you and your business have to make money. Even if you are working for someone else this fundamental principle changes quite a lot.

Many game design schools like to empathise the artistic side of game development, often at the expanse of the commercial side. The game industry might be different than most industries but it’s still an industry. Even if you don’t aspire to earn big bucks working on major blockbusters you still need to earn enough money to buy food and pay rent. As a student I had this notion that even really obscure games would somehow sell themselves and provide me with enough money for my basic needs, again I was wrong.

No game sells itself, no matter it's content, the people potentially buying your games are actual people and like most people they need to be triggered to buy something. I am not advocating that every game developer should become a total sell out to the masses, but every developer should think about the marketability of his product. There’s always a niche to be found somewhere but you need to know how to connect to them. Making a certain game simply because you like it, without looking at the market, is like an engineer building a bridge in the middle of a meadow simply because he likes the bridge so much.

Think about the hook of your game. What tiny bits of information are you gonna show or say to gamers or journalists who have never played your game that will instantly make them curious about it. If you can’t come up with anything you should consider changing or adding something to achieve this goal. This doesn’t even has to be something big, it could be a weird character, an awkward story, funny voice acting, extreme explosions, an unusual setting, etc.

Marketing isn’t just about spamming social media and sending out your game to every possible review website, it already starts during the design and development stages. If you manage to get this into your system as a student you will much more easily adapt to life as a graduate.

Follow me or Self Made Miracle on Twitter to stay connected! remember step 1? ;-)