A week left till September 30th and that will be my last day in my company.
The reason I resigned? Since early this year, it felt like my company management had lost its direction as to what it wants to achieve as a game developing company. There was no focus on what platform we should do, what audience we should target and what game genre we should excel at. Granted that producing multi-platform games is a valid business strategy, the management should consider what human resource they currently possess before trying to jump onto the big boys’ bandwagon. A company size of no more than 30 pax trying to produce games for WiiWare, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP and possibly XBLA concurrently… that is pretty damn ambitious I’ll say.
However, the company losing its direction and focus is just part of the reason. The main reason I resigned is because I feel that I didn’t have any chance to perform the role of a game designer since February 2009. When I first joined the company, I was really happy to be given the chance to work under a Lead Game Designer, let’s call him D. He gave me a lot of creative space to create game data for his mini games and went on to give me full responsibility of the game narrative scripting and the freedom to work directly with the programmers. In short, I felt that he trusted me and valued my opinion even though I am a fresh graduate. I was and am still very grateful to him for giving me such a wonderful working experience.
Sadly, things didn’t go so well after my first project. I was shifted to work on a game prototype with another team and ever since joining the team, my role as a Game Designer went from creative to clerical. I spent most of my time updating game design documents for my Project Manager under his strict supervision as he felt that he should have full control of the game design. There was even this one time when I was discussing with our UI artist about how we can improve the aesthetics of the UI, I was told not to interfere with the UI anymore as it is none of my business… like wtf eh?! The game look and feel isn’t the game designer’s business?!
After the prototype is done, I entered a phase where all I do was to keep producing pitching proposals as per requested by my Project Manager, who was tasked by our boss. So for nearly 4 months, I just churned out proposals after proposals which I hardly get any feedback or comments on unless I send it to my ex- business development manager. That phase was basically the last straw for me. All I have gotten from my company is by learning through mistakes that we have committed and while it is arguably the best way, it is also a painful and draggy learning process. And if the management actually learned from their mistakes and avoid them in future, I wouldn’t have mind staying. Regrettably, that isn’t the case
On the brighter side, I am glad that I have been accepted into the Digipen-Ubisoft course and I believe it will be quite a wonderful learning experience for me. I really hope to gain as much knowledge as possible from the Ubisoft production personnel and eventually be able to join Ubisoft as a Game Designer. I am viewing this opportunity as a silver lining in my seemingly bleak future as a game designer. If you are an aspiring game designer reading this, a word of advice is to always try to learn from everyone around you – be it fellow designers, artists, programmers, project managers, producers or anyone in the gaming industry. It is hard for a person to see things in many perspectives and thus obtaining feedback from everyone will often allow you to see what you are blind to. Ultimately, your job is to design a game that is well-liked by everyone, not just yourself.
I would like to end off by hoping that game companies will give their junior game designers more freedom to exercise their creative minds. IMHO, trust is the most valuable gift that a new game designer can ever hope for and it is through this trust that we can learn from the most. The ‘trust’ could be as simple as… say… being in charge of planning out the menu flow of a game and yet it can mean a lot to us.
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