Do You Want The Best Crafts-People ... Or The Best Game Devs?

Read Time: 7 Minutes

Ready for two stories?

I Don’t Do That

I was a producer on a content creation team. We had the full art pipeline in place as well as design and narrative pipelines. It was a live service game, and the things we produced needed extensive testing - early on to make sure they didn’t suck, and later to make sure they weren’t broken.

There was a character that had a tight timeline. We’d gotten the basics figured out, but we wanted to get it into playtests so we could see how it performed. Don’t get me wrong, we’d already been doing playtests, but with a designer-hacked other character. It wasn’t terrible, but it never quite provided the full picture.

A prototype model had been built and rigged, we needed a few blocked out -> autosplined animations just to get a feel for what the new character would look like.

The animator responsible for this character also had some other work to do on other characters. This was a talented craftsman of animation. Able to hit insane levels of polish, work in realistic or stylistic spaces … the sort of dream resume if you wanted a senior or principal animation expert on your team. Seriously amazing CV.

But … they didn’t want to do the simple blockouts. Everyone knew those early animations would be throwaway. The model was going to change more, the rig would need to be updated. This animator wanted to do work they wouldn’t have to do again. They wanted to take things to the insane high quality bar they could hit, not draft out some rough animations that we’d toss in the trash a few weeks later.

They knew what they were good at, and they wanted to execute that skillset as much as they could. Anything else felt like a waste to them. Even the hour (or less) spent throwing something temp together was not on the table. They were an expert animator.

We didn’t get the character prototype into internal playtests as quickly as we wanted. It took a long time. I even tried my own hand at animating to help unblock things, but it was a difficult, long process that took me days to get finished, even for terrible animations.

Let’s talk about story number 2.

I’m Not An Artist, I’m A Game Developer

A year or so earlier, I’d been working on an environment art project. As you’d expect, there were a ton of environment artists. One person in particular was named Peet. Peet was one of the best environment artists and general artists I’d ever met. He could concept, model characters or environments, had a background from Blizzard, and had no issue working as hard as necessary to get stuff done.

His quality bar was insane - he was the person who created our early vertical slice and defined the quality standards everyone would operate against.

At some point along the project, I can’t remember how it came up, but I remember he was regularly doing stuff that wasn’t environment art. He would help the narrative team with flags and faction style. He’d jump over to the creature team and blast out a few concepts when they felt stuck. 

He was constantly seeing where things could be better, then applying himself into that space. 

I asked him about this. He said he’d been in game dev for a long time, and outside of the technical stuff, he’d touched just about everything you could touch in an art pipeline. It had shaped how he approached the world. His job wasn’t to be the best, most efficient craftsman of a particular skillset he could be, it was to make games. As he so succinctly put it,

“I’m not an artist. I’m a game developer.”

Here was this person who had skills most environment artists would kill to have, a background that seemed steeped in being the best expert you could possibly be, and he wanted me and everyone else to know that he was a game developer first. This wasn’t about the art. It wasn’t about the CV or being told how awesome your stuff was. It was about shipping games and pieces of games. It was about making stuff players would love.

Now, let’s be really clear here. Peet was also an artist. And a shockingly talented one. BUT, the most important role he took on every day he came into work was “game developer.” Because that’s why we were there, and that’s how we would all win.

You Want Game Developers, Not Craft Experts

The games industry has grown. There are a lot of people out there who can do a lot of impressive things. Some are engineers, some are writers, some are artists or designers or producers.

As our industry has grown, so too have those crafts. What it means to be an expert, or “best in class” has gotten harder over time. The experience and expertise required to be viewed as a “world class” audio designer has only moved up. 

This can lead to people in games (and elsewhere) thinking that their core job is to become the best craftsperson they could possibly be. This is especially true in large companies, where specialization is rewarded and being the standard “highest quality <X>” feels like high praise.

In my experience as a producer and consultant working with many teams and companies, while I was always excited to work with best-in-class people, the more important thing was if they wanted to be the best GAME DEVELOPER they could be.

I think too many people believe this means becoming a jack of all trades, master of none. That’s not it. Sure, that’s an approach, and if you’re in an indie team or a solo dev I’d say having some people like that (or ALL being like that) is a good idea.

To be a game dev rather than expert craftsperson means focusing more on the big picture, and if the game (or part of the game) being made will work and land with your players, rather than narrowing in and doing only the thing you are best at.

A final story:

How Can I Help?

I worked with a concept artist named Larry. Larry had created a ton of rough sketches, refined over time, that became characters millions of players globally loved. The thing I loved about Larry in contrast to some other concept artists I worked with: Larry seemed totally unable to finish a concept, hand it off, and go onto the next thing.

He had to be talking to design and narrative about who the character was and what they did. He wanted to know their motivations and refine his concepts to align everything together. His depth of understanding meant he was always leading - formally or not - whoever was working on the characters he was concepting. 

When the character started moving down the art pipeline, Larry moved with it. He would create animation studies - not as a way to dictate to the animators, but as a way to get ideas flowing. He’d create VFX studies. He’d think about sound design. He’d wonder how else he could show the character that would help every other discipline better understand who it was and why players would engage with it.

Larry had this endless attitude of, “How can I help?” He would get excited, and get other people excited. He would lead, call out when there were problems, and bring people together to figure out a path forward. 

To come back to the point of this newsletter, Larry was a game developer first, and a concept artist second. 

He didn’t have some high-falutin storied background working at the biggest companies or biggest games. What he had was a desire to serve his team and ultimately players through what he created.

I LOVED working with Larry. I believe he helped things ship faster than they otherwise would have. His care for the whole and the player showed through every day that he worked.

Finding Game Developers

Please do not misunderstand me: I do not believe someone is either a craft expert OR a game developer. This is not a binary. Larry and Peet were phenomenal artists, but they were also unbelievably practical and focused on the outcome of what they were doing, rather than any craft-specific quality. 

You want to find people who think about the game first and the craft second. Especially at large companies, it’s easy to get swept away with impressive CVs, or past titles or studios on a resume. It’s easy to think that the best person must be the person who can hit the highest craft-specific quality.

I think this is a mistake, and a mistake a lot of studios make. The problem with this mistake is it causes people to think the best game developers to hire are the ones that can express the highest possible craft quality, rather than the ones who make the best things for players. Because those things are usually NOT the same.

When you’re hiring, think about asking questions that cause the engineer across from you, or the writer, or the QA, or whoever, to talk about how they interact with other disciplines. Don’t just grill them on their craft-specific skills with some light “culture check” questions thrown in.

Here’s some “top of my head” examples:

• Tell me about a time you helped other disciplines succeed.

• Tell me about work-related skills you’ve learned that have nothing to do with your craft, and why you learned them.

• Tell me about a time you worked with people outside your discipline to accomplish a goal.

• Can you talk me through an instance where you stood up something that wasn’t high quality to learn something?

You can use the “STAR” format for this. You want to ask followup questions to get a sense of the situation, the task, their action(s), and the result(s) of their behavior. 

Be wary of people who have never worked with other disciplines, or tell stories about how annoying it was to have to help other disciplines or do work that wasn’t specific to their expertise. 

Don’t overload the question - an inexperienced person might just not have the experience yet, but if you get someone who’s been in industry a minute and can’t think of a time they went outside of their craft bubble? That’s probably someone who cares more about being a great <X discipline> than a great game developer.

Hiring is a good place to start with this, but also recognize there are things you can do inside your studio to incentivize collaboration and a focus on the game and player, rather than the discipline silo.

• Don’t evaluate individuals based on the number of assets they produce

• Design your organization to focus on problems and opportunities from the player perspective, rather than thinking of everything as craft-specific deliverables

• Structure teams and work so that multiple disciplines regularly work together rather than having disciplines with handoffs between them

• Weight the player outcomes from cross-functional teams higher than the amount of stuff they make

• Encourage and set up situations where multiple disciplines attempt to solve player problems together, rather than always asking one specific discipline

• Above all, have and radiate out from leadership what the vision of the game is and as best you can make sure everyone is working towards that, not towards any local maximum

There’s a ton more things you can do. Hopefully that gets you going.

The coolest thing about this: many of the best game devs I’ve met were ALSO excellent craftspeople. And not just because they were super talented, also because they focused so much on being good game devs, they tended to think about entire pipelines and how to support them, rather than just their own piece of it. They had a better understanding of the entirety of development. It allowed them to spot problems well before they happened, in disciplines not their own.

When your concept artist can tell you right off the bat that you should definitely talk to your VFX lead before pursuing that cool idea everyone thinks is awesome, and that ends up saving you months of effort, you start to see the benefit of having people who feel responsible for the entire game, not just one craft within it.

In my experience, groups of game developers will outperform craft experts, and in the process will become the pragmatic experts you need to succeed in games.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

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