Acknowledging my influences and debts.

Here’s a personal one from AnthonyHJ…

While I may be the lead designer of Freya’s Aett, I was not always an indie; much of what I learned, I learned as a salaried employee in a bigger studio.  I want to talk about one of my pre-Freya’s Aett games in this post; it’s called Dragons’ Den and came out for the iPhone and iPad today. [App-Store Link]

This was actually not the last game I worked on, there are two more awaiting their moment in the sun, but it was one of the most important to me.  Dragons’ Den was my first experience of lead-design, running a whole team of developers and scheduling.  Thankfully, I had a very good mentor to call on when I needed a nudge in the right direction, in the form of industry-veteran Mete Djemal.  I could name all the brilliant individuals who taught me what I needed to know, but suffice to say that my design-style is a product of many men’s wisdom and many women’s too.

The first thing I discovered was that putting the words ‘Design Lead’ in your email signature does not make it so.  You have to earn the respect you might have hoped to get right off the bat, then you have to justify it by your actions.  I will not say that there were any real power struggles, but my lead programmer was the lead programmer, the Head of Technology at DR Studios.  I was a jumped-up narrative designer who had been a given a little project to lead.  There are 101 ways to approach this sudden shift in the power balance and most of them are bad ideas.  I had to learn humility, flattery and the subtle art of inspiring camaraderie.  Oh, that and blaming the deadlines on the COO…  Technically, since I was acting as the producer, it was that or blame Sony and I am not sure it would be very cathartic to moan about a monolithic entity like that.

In the end, I think my team were either humouring me or else had been getting stern looks from management, but at least we had a working relationship.  Sometimes, I even got everyone to turn up to the Scrum meetings, even if they did often happen an hour after the scheduled timeslot.  The game started to form.  I soon learned the next lesson.

If you are in charge, people ask you questions you were not expecting.  Yeah…  Design Documents…  They are never actually finished.  There is always something you forgot to write down.  You might not think some details are relevant, but it matters immensely to the artist  if you suddenly add in a button to the UI or if the game suddenly needs to support more than one currency.  Forward planning is key and here’s the kicker…  Sometimes, you need to delay the start of development until you finish designing, not try to finish it while the game is being built.  For a start, you don’t have much time to design if you are scheduling, writing strings, updating scripts and attending meetings to discuss why you are behind schedule.

Oh schedules…  How I despise thee…  I also kind of rely on thee too…

If you ask for time-scales and someone tells you ‘about a week’, get a solid time from them or they will remind you that it was only an estimate when the deadline passes unmet.  Telling the CEO you schedule was just an estimate will not fly.  Slack time…  Someone once said to add 10% slack.  Try 50% or more…  Never admit to management that you even have any slack time beyond about 10% of the estimate though.

The other thing, the big sin, is adding to the design without adding to the time-scale.  If you have a good idea, pitch it first.  Get an extension approved before adding the ‘essential feature’ and grovel if necessary to get it.

The thing is…  I never saw Mete do these things.  He missed deadlines (though much less than I did) and he must have been adding slack time to his schedules, but he made it look so easy and there is the biggest lesson; a good lead designer is like a swan, gliding effortlessly on the surface and paddling furiously under the waterline.  It reminded me of something I was once told as a young theatre director.

“Everyone is relying on you to be calm and in control.  You don’t have to manage it, but as long as you look like you have it all in hand, nobody else will panic.”

Sadly, I was unable to finish the development cycle due to certain economic factors, bringing it to life and then having to depart before the rough edges were fully rounded out, but I am told that Mete took up where I left off and I can’t say I disagree with the changes I have seen so far.  The game was a learning experience, a baptism of fire without which Freya’s Aett could never have been realised, and so I acknowledge my debt here and now to the team at DR Studios for making me the lead designer I am today.

– AnthonyHJ, a slightly-singed Narrative Designer