This is a version of an article that first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Every now and then, I get asked by a junior designer how to move up the ranks in hisorganization and become a senior designer or a lead.  There is no simple answer to this question – different designers at different organizations have wildly different day-to-day responsibilities and toolsets.

There are commonalities, though, things that are true no matter whether you’re a worldbuilder, a systems designer, or a game writer.  They are core personality traits focused on leadership, teamwork, and quality.  While they don’t belong in game design theory books, they are crucial to the success of large software projects, and among the most important traits I look for when interviewing potential design candidates.

Be s Finisher

Often when I give lectures to designers just starting out in the industry, they want one piece of advice they can use in their career.  They often seem disappointed when I respond with ‘finish and polish’, but then again, they don’t see all of the design submissions that I see that are sloppy and unpolished and that speak of huge ideas but demonstrate little follow-through.  Ideas are a dime a dozen.  Execution is what its all about.  A 60 second demo that is flawless is immensely more impressive to me than a 30 minute one with broken quests, untextured walls and typos in the dialogue.  Tragically, I see a lot more submissions with the latter.

As of this writing, Star Wars: the Old Republic’s release date has finally been revealed to the world a response of general jubilation of our fans.  Which, of course, means that right now, our focus is almost entirely on finishing – ensuring the game is polished and productized before it leaves our hands and gets to the raving hordes of diehard Star Wars fans, to a quality level that we can be proud of the result.   We’ve actually been in a mode of finishing already for months – long before our release date was public.  Part of what makes heavyweights like Bioware, Blizzard and Valve release such great games is their focus on ensuring the end product is one that these studios are proud to wear their brand.  Entry-level designers should strive to demonstrate that philosophy in their own work.

As a lead on a project, I’m insanely busy, so the designers I value the most are the ones who make problems disappear.  If I give them a problem, they drive it into the ground.  If someone files a bug, they not only fix the issue, but verify the issue isn’t systematic and fix other easily found variants of the issue.  If they need art, they go and get it – through properly approved channels of course.  Designers who take areas of responsibility and then knock it out of the park will almost always be recognized and given more.

Plan for Iteration

No design idea is perfect.  Many ideas that are great on a whiteboard fall apart once it actually becomes tangible.  Some ideas end up being awesome, but inappropriate for the game.  Sometimes, features fight each other – in particular, Gears of War was supposed to have more vehicle combat and squad control, but found these features were actually impeding on the cover gameplay, which they quickly realized was their bread and butter.  The game shipped with only light squad control and vehicle combat.

So its imperative that designers get their feature to iteration right away.  The feature needs to get tangible and in the hands of people playing it as soon as possible.  Get people to play it, watch them, take notes and make changes.  For the purposes of fact-finding, a pretty good prototype now is far better than a perfect implementation three months from now.  Getting that pretty good implementation will help you understand if the feature is on the right path, and may uncover and force you to face design roadblocks sooner than you otherwise would have.

Of course, what this means is that features need to be implemented in two phases – an initial phase, and an iteration phase where you apply what you’ve learned.  Note: working with Project Managers to make this happen is both crucial and challenging as the time you need is wildly variable: the feature may need minor tweaks, or a lot of time finishing the perfect version that you originally spec’ed.  Often, it is figuring out the design needs to go in a different direction altogether.  And of course, sometimes, the discovery is that a beloved feature needs to die.

Kill Your Babies

A producer once told me that the mark of a senior designer to him was that designer’s willingness to kill his own babies.  It is a design of great maturity to declare that you were wrong, and something needs to be axed, even moreso if the resulting cut will create a void the designer then has to fill with his own sweat.

At Bioware, we consider humility one of our core design principles, and the result is an environment where ideas are fertile, and the bad ones are dispensed with in a very Darwinian way.  Bad ideas can waste time, but can also give the team valuable lessons in the next way to go.  Good ideas can actually be harder to kill when they needed, such as when they detract from some other aspect of the game, or play awesomely but require more content than you can possibly do in the time you have.

Keep Your Perspective

One of the more interesting discoveries of my career is how distant these lost features, and the fights over them, look in retrospect.  I can remember arguments that we got into in the early days of developing Star Wars: the Old Republic.  In many cases, the people pounding their fists on the conference table back then don’t even remember what side they were arguing anymore.  In some cases, the same design topics would reopen, and people who argued one stance or another would have switched sides, based on where the game had evolved.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems almost comical the amount of energy and vim put into design discussions in the early days.  Over the long course of the project, nearly all of these topics were reopened at one time or another, and in most cases, the right decision won out in the long run, based on how it actually played in the game.

Value Data

Some designers fear feedback.  Designers that fear feedback are afraid that they’re going to be discovered as a fraud, and this general tendency is the mark of a junior designer to me.  They are ashamed that they might be called out on their work, challenged on their thinking, or being asked to do it again.

Senior designers crave feedback.  They understand that their idea isn’t perfect, and that the only way for it to get better is to get hands on it.  Good designers get on the forums and see what the fans are saying, or want to watch focus group players use the GUIs they’ve designed, or ask for real metrics on how a particular feature is performing.  Great designers have skin thick enough to keep on doing it, no matter how much their design is getting savaged.

Trust your Spidey Sense

It’s sometimes hard for designers to have perspective about whether or not one of their designs is really good.  However, most quality designers I’ve found have a really good instinct for when a design is bad.  They have a hesitant, uncertain feeling when they encounter and play with a feature – something at the back of their neck that says ‘something’s not quite right here!’  In almost every instance of my career where I’ve ignored that feeling, I’ve come to regret it later.

Good designers don’t let that feeling linger.  Instead, confront it.  Find other people to bounce your concerns off of, and try to actually quantify them on a piece of paper.  Make those concerns tangible and put them before the eyes of someone who could do something about it.  Whoever is designing that system is, much like you, hopefully eager for feedback, provided its presented constructively and actionably.

The Mindset of Development

It’s all good and well to be a wizard at UnrealEd, a savant with Excel and a professor of game design theory, but actually putting a game on the shelves requires a lot more than the nuts and bolts of putting together gameplay.  Senior designers have all that, and go beyond.

Only top-notch, triple-AAA product has a chance to compete in our crowded marketplaces, and these designers would do anything to get their games to that level of polish.  They also understand that fun is an elusive concept, and that the uncertain practice of iterating to find that fun is both necessary and yet limited by the necessity of production schedules.  Designers who can’t will always feel they can’t move up that ladder – and to be honest, they probably shouldn’t.  But those who can master these real-world production challenges will likely find that the sky is the limit in terms of their own professional success.