Bruce Shelley on Game Designer Attributes
Legendary game designer Bruce Shelley has taken to the BonusXP blog to summarise some of the most important attributes a game designer should have when working particularly at smaller video game studios. Bruce has long been encouraging of a studio wide playtest, where everyone in the studio regularly takes part in playtesting the game throughout the whole development process. This can be called a design by playing approach.
Most game studios, especially smaller teams like BonusXP, encourage, if not expect, everyone to take part in brainstorms, testing, and the overall design process, regardless of their main expertise. Over my thirty plus years of making games, these are some of the best practices or attributes that I saw work for effective colleagues; not all are game design specific.
Bruce’s blog goes on to talk about some of the other things that budding game designers should consider. From ensuring testing with multiple types of audiences (noob, mid-core, hard core) to managing a team and keeping control of the vision. Check out Bruce’s first BonusXP blog on the link below.
http://bonusxp.com/2015/01/game-designer-attributes/
Incidentally, as classic Ensemble fans, now might be a great time to look back on the words of wisdom from Bruce’s past blogs at Ensemble Studios. You can find them all here in our Ensemble blogs archive.