Most aspiring game designers have a wrong perception of the game industry.

Big studios’ marketing and the gamer culture at large create a false myth of the working experience. You have a romanticized point of view of big companies as the ideal place to learn “real game design”, but they’re not. This makes you take the wrong learning paths and keeps you further away from the only thing you should focus on.

Mastering game design skills. If you believe you need to “do the job” to actually learn game design, keep reading because I’ve something important to tell you.

I’m afraid your blinded focus on job hunting and working experience might be keeping you from learning game design.

The Dangerous Lie That Many Aspiring Game Designers Fall Into About Working In A Game Studio

If you're an aspiring game designer, working in a real game studio is your dream.

I know it because I've been there too. Whether it's a big company or the studio you want to build from the ground up, it doesn't matter.

You love your job, and you'll do everything to reach that goal. You've determined to put in the necessary effort and become appealing to the big guys out there. You've even dreamed of being there and working with skilled and passionate people like you. Talking about games and playing them all day with your peers.

Those same huge and fun games you played for hours and hours since you were a tiny human being. Wouldn't it be cool to be the game designer creating those beautiful worlds and characters?

If this is your vision, we need to fix it right away.

You're hurting yourself and your career. And the worst thing is that you're not even realizing it. So pay attention because I need to tell you how things really are.

Game Design is one of the most satisfying jobs in the world.

But it's also one of the hardest ones when done well. And let me tell you this.

It's near to an impossible job if you keep that idealized point of view on game companies. You're projecting the beauty and fun of playing a game into the game designer's job. You might think, "But they're dealing with games, too, so it must be fun".

Let me make it clear with an analogy. It's like saying that building houses is relaxing because you feel relaxed at home watching TV.

You see, it's nonsense.

A Game Designer is not just a passionate player who designs games.

It's a kick-ass professional with a specific mindset and a set of skills. Of course, you need to be passionate about games and playing them, but that's not enough to design them.

In a game company, game designers solve design problems and structure every detail of the player experience. You're going nowhere if you want to design games only because you like playing them. The game design job is a real one in many ways.

You must manage tasks with due dates and collaborate with your peers to determine the best choices for the game vision. And most importantly, you must know how to structure game elements and iterate on them over and over.

Those are hard skills to learn.

"Oh god, so it's not a dream job but a nightmare!"

Do you want the truth? If you're here, I bet you do.

Being a game designer is an absolute freaking nightmare if you have that idealized mindset. You will be disappointed after a few days of work if you haven't already realized it by doing projects on your own.

If you keep thinking like a player, you risk destroying the same passion that brought you to read these lines. I don't want to burn your motivation to the ground, but I want you to redirect it to the right path. So, move as far away as possible from this idealized mindset.

Especially if your dream is to work for a big Triple-A company. Again, don't project the fun of playing commercial games into designing them.

The big company behind your favorite game is not necessarily a good company to work into.

If you think you'll love to work for a big company like Naughty Dog, Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, CD Project, etc. (to name a few), pay attention! These are huge companies with thousands of employees and hundreds of processes. They're hard to manage and full of difficult issues to fix.

Also, here is something that is not spoken too often.

Working in a Triple-A company doesn't mean working on big mainstream titles.

You get hired as a Game Designer to work on the Assassin's Creed team, so you'll work directly on Assassin's Creed, right? Yeah, that's true, but not how you expect it.

Your mind goes right to creating big levels, main quests, core gameplay features, etc. The harsh reality is that, especially if you've just been hired, you'll work on small details. A minigame, a tiny piece of a secondary quest, and things like that.

This happens for 2 main reasons:

• The big tasks are assigned to Seniors/Leads
• The bigger the game, the more people are involved, and the smaller your work will be

It's not an evil behavior but a management necessity due to the game's scale.

I'm not telling you to avoid big companies. I just want you to be aware of how the game industry works without you building false illusions about it.

Approaching this environment with the standard player mindset is foolish.

Designing games is fun and satisfying, but it's a different kind of fun. And you need to learn to appreciate that perspective; it's not something you necessarily have as a player. Designing games is 100% different than playing them.

This is true even for small studios on the indie side of the game industry.

The only difference between a Triple-A company and an indie studio in terms of game design is game size. The scale of the game indeed brings a lot more challenges and obstacles.

Yet, game design is always game design. You need the right mindset and set of skills to solve design problems, regardless of their size. I know you have at least one question right now.

"How do I shift my mindset and master those skills to think like a real game designer?". That's where I need to uncover another lie that you tell yourself.

They told you that game design is practical; therefore, you'll really learn it by doing the job.

I'm sorry to tell you they lied to you. I'm sure they haven't done it with bad intentions, but that's a really dangerous thing to say.

Many people (including veteran game designers) often live in the past. They learned game design right into the job through an infinite and frustrating series of trial-and-error. They were not idiots. That was the only way of learning game design back in the day. Games were much smaller and simpler then, and game design as a discipline wasn't ever a thing.

Designing games needed less thinking and more implementation. Yet, this was roughly 30 years ago.

Welcome to the present day, where it's exactly the opposite.

Let's go deeper and fix this lie, shall we?

Believing You Will Learn Game Design By “Doing The Job” Is A Road Straight To Failure

Imagine for a moment you’ve been hired in your favorite game studio.

Do you think you’ll immediately start working on major game content? Think again!

They will never leave you alone working on game content and stuff. They don’t trust you yet, and you need to gain that trust by being dependable. So, you’ll be joined by a senior game designer who will follow you and onboard you into the company’s main activities.

There will be a lot of new things, and you need to get used to the environment.

This period can take a few months to a full year (or even more sometimes), depending on the company’s size and procedures. And, of course, depending on how much effort you put into it and at what level your skills are.

In this time frame, especially in the first few months, it’s pretty much everything new to you. Every day, you learn something useful to improve your skills as a designer. That’s what most advice about “learn by doing the job” is about. But here is the problem with them none tells you.

That’s not actually learning game design because you need to focus, rightly, on learning the company’s tools and procedures. In between them, you can sprinkle in some creativity.

That’s why learning the right mindset and design skills before getting the job is crucial.

Let me tell you a secret. That good feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment in the game design job comes from deep knowledge of every design decision you make.

If you work out of gut feelings and just try out random things instead, 2 main things happen. First, you have no control over your design process since you cannot analyze your current scenario and choose the right direction. Second, most importantly, you won’t improve an inch of your understanding of game structure.

You don’t actually know the game design discipline. You’re just applying your gamer tastes, hoping that something will eventually work out of magic.

Unfortunately, many dinosaur veteran game designers have reached this point.

The work gets monotonous, not strictly because they are doing roughly the same thing every day (nonetheless, they do). But because they do it mainly out of heuristics.

Most of the time, they don’t know exactly what they’re doing on an analytical level. They know it works because it’s a similar case to one that happened before, so they apply that solution. They don’t know why it works; it just “feels right” to them.

But often, it could be that another more interesting solution is around the corner and gets passed by because it’s out of their gut thinking.

I don’t care about claiming 12 years of working experience as a game designer.

And I don’t care about the big companies in the CV either. If you worked 12 years doing the same thing over and over without deep analytical knowledge of the game design discipline, it means nothing.

You actually have 2 months of experience spread over 12 years. This becomes clearly visible when some veteran game designers change the genres they work in. They’re not adaptable and need to learn things from scratch again because they lack the fundamental knowledge about how game design works under the hood.

I bet this is not where you want to end up with your career, am I right?

The “I’ll do it then” approach won’t work ever.

If you jump right into searching for a job (and even landing it) without proper mindset and skills, you won’t have time to do it then. Especially in big companies, the design job can easily get boring and repetitive.

As a junior, you work on such small tasks that you may not feel you are making a real impact. You’ve landed your dream job but discover it’s dull. Yet, it’s your lack of analytical skills, not the job per sé. You won’t have time to reflect on what you’re doing and how because you’ll need to get used to new tools (often proprietary) the company uses.

The game studio hired you to produce work, not to learn. Sure, they could invest in you if they see your potential, but they rarely do it because it’s super expensive.

Also, if they did, they would not optimize it for learning how game design works but on company pipelines.

Simply put, it’s not their job to teach you what you should already know.

If You Want To Master Game Design You Need To Go Beyond Working Experience

It should be clear enough to you by now.

You won’t ever master the game design process by merely working in a game company. And this is not something unique to game development; it’s the reality of every job.

But pay attention! Don’t go at full throttle to the other side. This doesn’t mean that working experience is useless.

On the contrary, it’s super important, but its purpose is not to teach you game design skills. It’s to improve and strengthen them by making you face different scenarios where you apply (and refine) what you know.

Working experience is literally what it is.

Being an expert at working in an environment. That’s it. That’s a good thing, but it’s unrelated to advanced game design skills. It’s not even why you were hired.

No matter the size, every company has its own processes and way of organizing work.

When they put out job postings, they already know candidates are not used to working in their company. How would they be?

Sure, a candidate could translate some working experience from other companies, but it won’t always work. Some companies work very differently, especially in creative industries like game development. On the other hand, the game design skills you need to do the job are always the same.

They’re bound to the discipline of game design, not the job itself. That’s a crucial difference to remember.

They ask for “years of experience” in job postings because they have no other way of measuring game design skills. And they’re trying to filter out people who apply randomly and make them lose time. But that’s another topic of discussion.

So, let’s get back on track.

You’ll not become a professional by doing the same thing over and over.

You’ll just stall both in improving and in your career. The issue with this kind of mindset comes from a fundamental wrong belief about game design.

You’ve probably read all over the place that “to learn game design, you need to make a lot of games”. Oh, dear. That’s not 100% false, I get it, but it’s dangerously misleading.

And the worst part is that those who follow this advice often end up on the wrong path.

Here’s what happens.

You think, “Oh, great. So I need to learn how to make a game”. Where’s the best place online to learn how to do something nowadays?

Exactly, YouTube. And this is already the end of the race for game design. You end up in the “Make You First Game With Unity/Unreal” endless pit, and you’re done. Bye-bye game design for at least a few months. You’ll switch your focus on implementing feature after feature without any design thinking whatsoever.

Why a few months? Because that’s about the average time it takes people to understand that they either missed something (they have no clue what, though) or drop out altogether.

But the worst end comes to those who clench their teeth and carry on that path.

They just learn how to use software and nothing more. They believe they know game design because they feel an improvement from cranking up small games one after the other.

Yet, they have not learned a thing about:

• Expanding ideas into structured and refined gameplay
• Breaking down each gameplay element to understand what happens under the hood
• Think and work in terms of game direction to avoid working out of intuition and gut feelings

They’re just executors in front of a computer, nothing more.

If you take this road, you’ll find yourself with easily replaceable skills that anyone can have.

Why? Because they’re strictly bound to software that will change in a couple of months with an update.

But let me tell you more. In reality, game design disappeared from your goals right after you chose to follow the initial advice.

That’s what I mean when I say that you won’t learn game design by just making games.

I know all of this could seem weird and counterintuitive.

Game design is a field so hands-on that it seems the perfect example of the saying “practice makes perfect”. Yeah, practice does indeed make you better, but there’s a catch missing.

You need to know what you’re doing. Otherwise, you won’t learn a thing from your mistakes or the new challenges you face. If you can’t think analytically and make informed decisions like a game design, things will pass before you, and you’ll never notice them.

So, it’s 100% reasonable to focus on landing a job and wanting to bring your ideas to life as soon as possible.

If you look forward to that, I get it; your drive is admirable, and I’m sure it will take you far. That’s a great feeling, I can’t deny that!

However, let me ask you something I feel I already know the answer. Do you want to keep all of this just a dream hurting you every time you think about it, or do you want to make it real? I’m sure you’re the kind of person who strives for the best.

Who wants to defeat the feeling of frustration when, despite being technically proficient, you fail to show design skills when it really matters.

Who won’t get stuck in front of a design problem because you don’t have the analytical skills to understand it.

Who won’t ever let your passion die out more and more until it disappears.

So, if you want to really learn game design, you can’t rely only on working experience and practice.

You need to turn yourself into an analytical game designer. A real professional who doesn’t work by trial and error but has a precise method of approaching and solving design problems.

You must learn to break down any gameplay elements (no matter the genre) to understand what happens under the hood. Only with this knowledge and skill can you gain a serious advantage over others. And let me tell you something to make it clear.

There’s a precise reason why this is the most important thing for you. Companies search for exactly that when hiring game designers.

They evaluate your portfolio and CV and you as a person to get a glimpse of your thinking process.

If you make it as sharp as possible, they will notice it at first glance.