I'm Fairly Certain Blizzard Doesn't Want To Encourage This

Posted on September 26, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 59 Comments

This will either go very, very well, or very, very badly. Or both!

Note: handwritten signs more appropriate for cadging money at street intersections tend to frighten HR.

Note: handwritten signs more appropriate for cadging money at street intersections tend to frighten HR.

This entry was posted in _. Bookmark the permalink.
Newer Comments →
  • Vetarnias

    Incidentally, there’s a follow-up: two guys from PR came out to the sidewalk and told me I was kinda going about this in the wrong way. They said it in the best possible way, though, so maybe the trip down wasn’t a total loss. They could obviously see I was passionate about wanting a job, but they pointed out that any submissions by fans (and not employees) for raid dungeon ideas or the like automatically go in the bin without being read, as a rule, and for legal reasons.

    I thought as much. Like Hollywood studios who won’t touch unsolicited screenplays and will return the envelopes unopened, they’re afraid of getting sued by you in the event that somewhere, somehow, one of your ideas ends up in what they’re making — or that you may have plagiarized someone else, who won’t hesitate to sue guys with deep pockets like ActiBlizzard.

    Unless Blizzard runs a contest to that effect (which might be good for PR, but with strict guidelines, and a “whatever you submit becomes our property, with an already determined financial compensation if we use it”), I don’t think he has a chance. And who knows? It might be something Blizzard could consider; didn’t Wizards of the Coast run a contest for a new D&D setting a while back?

    In the meantime, though, it’s just another reason why it’s a waste of time to try to build something out of someone else’s intellectual property. Much better to do your own thing; if he can code, he could try to build his own little game.

  • Toastrider

    It’s not just screenplays and raid dungeons. This has come up in the engineering industry as well — the company I work for does not solicit new designs and will not even open envelopes with them.

    I can’t tell you /exactly/ how it works, although it does have to do with legal liability and intellectual property. Grab an IP or patent lawyer and ask them.

  • Informis

    Yeah, we’re told to send it to legal the instant we realize what it is.

    My first impulse was to call this guy crazy, until my wife reminded me I got 2 interviews with Lucasarts based on a resume that listed only Star Wars experiences (i.e. “fluent in the binary language of moisture vaporators, speaks bocci, bad motivator repair”). Whatever works.

  • http://idempot.net/blog/ Matthew Weigel

    I’ll note that responding to a posterboard sign like that – “HIRING PROGRAMMER 4 MMO” – did in fact get me a job once. Amazingly, the job was indeed programming on an MMO, not giving oral sex in a dark alley two streets down. You never can tell with posterboard signs.

    Depending on the exact lawyers you talk to, and what caveats you put around the system, soliciting suggestions from players CAN BE acceptable. But, you know, be careful. IANAL etc. :-)

  • Lorekeep

    What the people who attempt this method of trying to get hired at Blizzard fail to realize is that Blizzard doesn’t need to hire off the street.

  • Gx1080

    Ok, the first part of the article: Go to Linkedln, search social contacts in there is good, but most software companies have a website where there is a list of job openings, skills necessary for said jobs and contact information.

    I’m pretty sure that going for there is more effective than putting a board sign (it helps that you don’t have a repel aura against the legal team).

    And encouraging crazy people to be crazy is never a good idea.

  • Freakazoid

    You know, in the past, MMO developers hired people just for ranting about MMOs or running popular raid guilds. It’s not a long stretch that someone with this much “motivation” (crazy) could be hired by an MMO developer. It won’t be blizzard, because they have the clout to pick from the best.

    I have personally considered going up to Bellevue and applying to work on Tigon Studios’ Barca B.C. MMO. My only qualifications, of course, are playing and commenting about MMOs for the past 10 years. Even if I’m not accepted, it’ll give them something to talk about while they figure out how a server works.

  • gyrus

    Although it’s kind of sad that companies are afraid to touch stuff (ideas and submissions) because they might get sued.
    And really, everything that we are, every idea we have is probably inspired by something else, somewhere, somehow.

    But as for this sort of tactic to get employed?
    In 1990(ish) a marketing graduate who wanted a job with NZs Lion Nathan (brewery) embarked on a campaign to get noticed.
    He wore a Lion suit around town. Put up a Billboard with something like “I’m hunting YOU Lion.” on it near the front entrance and organized to have a shoe, containing the note “I just wanted to get my foot in the door.” put in the CEOs door. He got the job.

    Crazy? Too crazy to be a game designer? Not qualified enough?
    Game Design can be as much art as science. Sometimes a little bit of crazy can be mistaken for genius.

  • http://www.ralphlee.com/ Ralph

    I work across the street from Blizzard HQ and haven’t seen a single crazy protester. I’m not really sure why; you’d think that there would be disgruntled deathknights/jilted raiders/etc..

  • http://ixobelle.com ixobelle

    yeah well. I had driven down there thinking handing out these PDFs in full color printed glory (link to PDF at my site) would maybe been seen as a good thing, not some ZOMG NO WE CAN’T TAKE THOSE BECAUSE THEN YOU COULD SUE IF WE MADE YOUR DUNGEON kinda thing.

    At that point, I was already in Irvine, and am not really opposed to neon signs with arrow pointing at me saying ‘WILL TRY HARD TO GET HIRED, NOT JUST GIVE UP AT FIRST SIGN OF HARD WORK’.

    Meh, didn’t work, but who knows… maybe it’ll still come full circle? The people that DID stop to talk to me were all very positive, and even the guys who finally got me to pack up and go weren’t dicks about it. They just told me why they couldn’t take the documents (as mentioned above), and then suggested I put my effort towards making mods to show I can work with scripts.

    Meh.

  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    He’s clever and passionate, I hope he gets a job there.

    He’s not just sitting on pavements, he is also applying in more conventional ways.

    I hardly think him getting a low paid customer service helpdesk job is going to fill up the street with similar signs.

  • http://ixobelle.com ixobelle

    …and for the record, I also applied ‘the normal’ way ;)

  • gyrus

    Where did that PDF link go – I would like a look.

    More on the subject of “borrowed idea… we might get sued!”
    Anyone been following the “Twilight” series?
    Based on what I have read, seen and been told ALL the ideas in that are borrowed from other vampire & vampire/werewolf stories.

  • gyrus

    never mind…found PDF

  • Foamy Squirrel

    @gyrus – yeah, derivative stuff and blatant copying happen all the time. It’s fairly common for producers to call for demo material submissions for an open position, hire the person they had in mind anyway, and then recycle the submitted stuff.

    http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/go-inside-the-wanda-sykes-show-packet/

    On a side note, if you’re into the whole “going on a road trip to convince someone to give you a job” thing, you could do a lot worse than Eve Online’s CCP – they’ve “hired” (for a given value of “hire”) players to help out on their tournament events and have even announced their HR people will be taking resumes at their fanfest. Of course, you’d have to get out to Reykjavik by this weekend…

  • gyrus

    I would be curious what some of the game designers who have worked in the industry think of the PDF presentation?

  • Calelari

    Am I the only one whose first thought on seeing the sign (without any context) thought “Scary way to advertise for a date”?

  • Vetarnias

    “In 1990(ish) a marketing graduate who wanted a job with NZs Lion Nathan (brewery) embarked on a campaign to get noticed.”

    Yeah, but it’s marketing. A good marketing person will and should find a way to market himself that is original, without being facepalm-inducing.

    Business/management types are just expected to be ruthless, so it is perhaps quite normal to hire someone who would answer, when asked in a job interview what their goals would be in the company, “to have your job” (as I’ve heard happened with a co-worker’s wife a few years ago). For everyone else, that’s not to be attempted.

    Likewise, putting a shoe with a message in the Blizzard front door might work perfectly well if you’re applying to marketing, but it says nothing about your abilities as a programmer. And a programmer should not have to resort to such tricks to get hired; only the quality of his work should matter.

  • gyrus

    @Calelari,
    I thought the sign ruined the whole pitch actually.

    @Vetarnias,
    Yes, but in this case he did a PDF of a Dungeon… so not your conventional approach for the job – but appropriate in this case. I wrote that in response to Gx1080. Doing a CV and posting to HR in any job is a good way to get lost in the crowd.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    Apparently this sort of thing happens a lot. I’ve read a story about a well-meaning fellow who actually left his country of original and showed up at a game development office one day. Hey guys, looks like your job is a lot of fun, lets go make some games, right? Of course, that doesn’t work out, he was taking a taxi back to the airport before the day is out.

    Game development isn’t something you should expect to show up one day and start doing – it’s more of a craft. If you really want to get started in game development, you’ll want to dabble with it as a hobby for awhile. Take that raid dungeon home, get a good cheap game development kit (like BYOND) and see for yourself how well it works out.

    By the time you’re ready to join a big-name outfit, you should have the skills to pretty much create your own independent game. You’ll make many games that suck before you get good at it. Expect the process of refining your skills to take years. Better devise a means to pay the bills that long in the meanwhile.

    On the other hand, there’s the other route while involves going through a game development course and being chucked in the hopper as burnout fodder. You’re easily replaceable because you have no real unique skills, you’re no craftsman. However, if your nerves don’t completely melt down under the stress, you’ll gain some valuable experience and maybe hardened enough for the industry to become something substantial. More likely, you’ll learn the job sucks and find something better to do with your time.

    Of course, I don’t speak from much experience (except in the ‘dabbling at home seems to produce results at really understanding what game development is’ field). I picked up most of this from Chris Crawford’s “The Education of a Game Designer” writeup.

  • http://n3rfed.blogs.com Cosmik

    Unfortunately most would-be game designers feel that designing a dungeon and adding it into a PDF with some pictures is enough to land an interview (I’ve seen a few of these PDFs and documents floating around the intertubes now). I can’t fault the passion for writing and “paper designing” in these instances, but what happened to obtaining some skills such as Lua or creating modules? You know, the kind of stuff that the game design advertisements actually mention as necessary/desirables.

    Coders have samples, artists have portfolios, producers show they can make a good cup of coffee – game developers in general are finally stepping up to the plate and asking to see examples of tangible, software-based work from prospective game designers. Would-be game designers should get on board that idea. It really gives a leg up. I mean, if you want to be a game designer, why wouldn’t you want to learn and demonstrate that stuff?

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    Um you are supposed to get hired with an ass kissing blog that is popular… DUH!

  • Brent Michael Krupp

    Coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part anyway. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s actually planning, coding, implementing, etc. etc. those ideas so they’re fun to play in a timely fashion that’s hard. Some guy showing up with a PDF is exceedingly unlikely to be of any use on the important stuff.

  • http://www.antipwn.com/blog/ IainC

    I have two stories I can share from both sides of this particular coin.

    Many years ago I was working for Games Workshop as a games developer. I’d just moved to Nottingham and was being put up in the company house until I could find a place of my own. Sharing the house with me was a guy from Hong Kong called K K Kwok. He was a huge Warhammer fan and was pretty bothered by the availability of rules in Chinese so, he and his friends translated them all between them. He then got on a plane and turned up at GW HQ with these translations and asked if anyone would like them. He now runs GW’s Chinese studio.

    On the other hand I’ve never yet been at an industry event where someone hasn’t tried to hand me a folder full of dreams. I remember at the D3 show there was a steampunk game looking for funding and a technical partnership. They had a booth, a first playable concept and people in costumes walking around, handing out flyers. By contrast, the guy who wanted us to make his game had a ’200 page design document in his head’.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Yeah, I’m not sure why they wouldn’t want to encourage it. They’re constantly hiring, have internship programs with local universities that get filled a year in advance …

    … yeah, I guess I always figured this was going on 24/7 all over Irvine anyway. I’m already convinced every mid-20s nerd in Austin has had experience working at the Blizzard support shop or knows someone who has.

  • Guy

    He then got on a plane and turned up at GW HQ with these translations and asked if anyone would like them. He now runs GW’s Chinese studio.

    Well now see, that’s providing a valuable service for free. Translations can cost a lot, and providing it for free, without even the work involved in finding a suitable company/individual to do it, is a sweet deal.

  • http://www.antipwn.com/blog IainC

    This whole thing shares a strange harmony with the story that Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) tried pitching a game to various publishers without, apparently, much success.

    This handily underlines the point that games companies don’t want people to walk up to them with ideas, they want them to walk up with a game. I wonder how Mr Reznor would react to someone pitching him ideas for songs rather than some actual music?

  • http://www,damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Reznor went to Midway. They’re now bankrupt, bought up and soon to be permanently de-branded.

    COINCIDENCE?

    Actually, for all Reznor knows, he ought to just bypass the publishers entirely. He’s got the scratch, if he can find someone to do the actual work for him. Actually, wannabe dev studios ought to be going to him, and I’d be surprised if he hasn’t got calls since that article came out.

  • gyrus

    You know, what I am getting from this discussion is:
    “The only way to get into this business is to be in this business already.”

    I work in an industry that has had that attitude for a decade or more.
    Thing is, now senior people are leaving (or just dying!) and they have suddenly realized that there is a huge gap between ‘soldiers’ and ‘chiefs’.
    A lot of people were never given the chance(s) they should have been given and as a result they left.
    The business will survive – but it will not advance and will have to struggle to re-learn old lessons.

    As far as MMOs go I guess we will just have to rely on the Koreans?

  • Joe

    Sorry, Gyrus, you couldn’t be more off base. The problem the games-industry faces in sorting its prospective new-hires is that it’s an industry that looks “fun” to the mouthbreathing class of teens and 20somethings that went to nowhere special for college, studied nothing special, and have basically no idea what they want to do with their lives and no useful skills. The kind of people who we can hopefully replace in our population with H1Bs from more rigorous countries as time goes on. Who fancy themselves as being vaguely ‘creative’ and ‘big picture types’.

    If you’re actually interested in running a successful business, a successful creative enterprise, a successful anything, you know these people are the plague. They have overly romantic notions of how things work and tend to fly by the seat of their pants. They either change their approach dramatically or they get flattened.

    Ixobelle, you want some real advice?

    Forget showing up at their doorstep and pitching them for a job.

    Next time, work your LinkedIn contacts, find whoever you can in the industry, and start treating them to lunch. Pick their brain. Do your homework. ASK THE SMARTEST QUESTIONS. Make connections. Be someone that people know, and are impressed by.

    You’re not in college anymore. “But I tried really really hard!” gets you nowhere except with your spouse and your dog. Be savvy. Be calculating. Put your head down, and get to work.

    And quit wasting your time on actually playing MMOs until you’ve got the major parts of your life straightened out.

    Get some rigor in your life.

  • Joe

    And for what it’s worth, I might go to work in the games field myself… but at age 40, minimum. In the meantime, I’m doing interesting fulfilling work outside of that.

    In the meantime, I’ve got an MMO planned out. Not in the ’200 page design document in my head’ pie-in-the-sky-bullshit sense, but in all the logistics. How does the content pipeline work? What makes the rate of art assets feasible for content consumption, etc.? Where does my playerbase come from? Where do I get adequate financing and human resources at each stage of the journey? What feeds retention? Where will my players feel the ‘fun’ comes from? What are my revenue models? What technology and middleware makes the design merely possible, and what makes it feasible? How will hosting costs scale for playerbase size? How do I account for the fact that things will always be several times as hard as I initially predict?

    These are all things I’ve planned out, and it’s about 12-18 months before the middleware I’m looking at makes it feasible. I’ll probably invest about ~$20,000 over the entire course of the thing. If it works, it’ll be revolutionary, from an MMO point of view — literally an experience you’ve never had before in an MMO. And if that happens, I’ll likely sell it off or transfer ownership to someone else, and get started on the next design (It’ll be about 5 years minimum before all the relevant factors are in place to make that one feasible.)

    After (and only after) a few rounds of success with the above, I could see myself going to work for someone else. In short, if I haven’t already been asked to speak at GDC, I wouldn’t feel I have enough that’s relevant and new to offer someone else.

    Seriously. If you want to get into making games… don’t quit your day job, and actually *build games* on the side. That’s the long and short of it.

  • Gx1080

    Moral of the story: Design isn’t hard. Everything else is. And this industry isn’t going to hire anybody if they can’t do the latter.

    “Stop playing MMOs” isn’t something that I would recommend, because it helps to avoid the (always looming) burn-out. But the point still stands: Go to this like you would go to any other job. Prove that you can be useful for something besides doing .pdf files while being on crack.

    Video games DO ARE serious business for the companies that make them because they have to make a profit, keep a bottom end, keep stockholders (and investors in general) happy and, more importantly, maintain themselves and their families. Mouth-breathing idiots aren’t helpful except as costumers. Sorry, no way around it.

  • http://www.antipwn.com/blog/ IainC

    As someone who has ‘Games designer’ as a job title, I take exception to the ‘design isn’t hard’ part of that reply. Design without reference to anything else isn’t hard. I could design a kick-ass game if I didn’t have to worry about technical requirements, engine limitations, networks, oh and players that don’t like the exact same kind of thing that I do or who might want to play in a way that diverges from the optimal.

    But the devil as always is in the details and no design doc survives contact with Engineering.

  • Joe

    Going off of IainC’s comment, for anyone who wants practice designing within a set of limitations and working on how to break those limitations?

    ZZT.

    Go ahead and google it. It’s free to download these days, there are hundreds of games out there that stretch its very limited powers to the max, and you can learn the scripting language in an easy afternoon. The people that made it happen almost 20 years ago are now making the Unreals and Gears of Wars and whatnot.

    It also has limitations that will drive you bonkers until you learn how to get around them. Learning how to get around them is the interesting part. People have actually hacked the editor to add more colors to the palette, for instance. I was at the forefront of breaking some of those limits myself, a decade or so ago (And was responsible for one half of the ‘ZZT Encyclopedia’).

    ZZT is primitive, but it has many, many things to teach you if you’re willing to learn. You have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk.

    Learning to walk would be the demoscene.
    Things like this: http://www.theprodukkt.com/

    I’m still not at the ‘learning to walk’ stage myself. But hey, in due time.

    The skills that you’ll learn in the demoscene are the ones that’ll power the really innovative games coming down the pipe. Spore and Scribblenauts being the two latest-greatest examples.

  • Joe

    Oh, and those games you’re thinking about designing?

    Design them for the iPhone.

    Design them for Google Android.

    Stick yourself in a format with serious limitations to build up a good, rigorous design ethic. You’ll thank yourself down the road. And with a format like this, at $2.99 in the apps store you might even get a user-base to give you cheap, instant feedback. That’s always nice.

  • Tremayne

    @Gyrus
    The way into the business is to have valuable skills, or to go in at the bottom and work your way up – that usually means starting out as a QA tester or CSR and proving that you’re smart and hard-working. Designing a raid dungeon isn’t entry-level, it’s the thing that most of the guys in the busines aspire to doing. You only get hired straight in to do that if you’ve got a proven track record with another company.
    Valuable skills don’t have to be game related – cf the Chinese guy who did translation work, and IIRC Scott was a database programmer in the real world before he went to Mythic. If I was going for a job at a company like Blizzard I’d probably be talking up my experience doing live support programming for a telephone banking service – because it isn’t games industry experience, but fixing customer-facing incidents on a high availability service is a useful skill set to have when the servers go down. If you have experience in project management, scrtipting, extracting and analysing data reports – any of these can be valuable. But dreaming up “teh INSTANCE!!!” won’t hack it because Blizzard have 11 million players out there every one of whom can do that, and they only need two or three guys at most doing it for a living.

  • Joe

    Also, take a lesson from government policy memos. You’ve got an idea to pitch? 2 or 3 pages, max. Use bullet points. Make it sing.

    Dreaming out all the details in 20 pages is a great way to convince yourself you’ve got something more profound going on than you actually do.

    The game design I’m talking about above? I can make you want to play it in 2 pages. Any job I’m applying for? I can (hopefully) make you want to hire me in a brisk three-paragraph cover letter.

    If you’re pitching someone who has veto power over your goals and dreams, don’t hand them a 20-page binder, even if you printed it up very nicely at Kinko’s.

    I’m sorry if this comes off sounding brusque. If I ever met you in person, I’d buy you a smoothie (or a beer if you really want, but smoothies are better) for trying and give you a pat on the back and a smile. But reality is reality, and hopefully giving you a dose of it will help you down the line.

  • gyrus

    @Gx1080 “design isn’t hard”
    No. But good design is.
    Game design is no exception. (I have been designing and analysing games for 30 years both as a hobby and as part of my mathematical studies)

    Yes, I do appreciate the “mouthbreathing class of teens and 20somethings that went to nowhere special for college, studied nothing special, and have basically no idea what they want to do with their lives and no useful skills” thinking they can design and manage and have ‘compooter skillz’ (I lived with one who was a modder, called himself a programmer, and didn’t know what a compiler was…)

    So yeah, I appreciate both sides of the argument here. But, I still see a lot of negativity. This guy at least did something and got his idea on paper – more than 99% of people do for a start. No, I wouldn’t employ him as a Game Designer based on that either. But I wouldn’t write him off either.

    I would still be curious to know what those of you who do (and have done) this for a living think of this presentation? (The PDF)

  • Gx1080

    Ok, take in mind that I’m not a designer but I can still give an opinion.

    Ok, 40 pages in total. That tells a lot. I read it (or at least skimmed it) and noticed a lot of things missing:

    1)Illustrations for every kind of mob. How do the mobs will even look? In that same vein, the bosses illustrations are not detailed at all.

    2)Specific names and numbers for EVERY single spell that both the mobs and the bosses can cast. This is necessary because is how you tell the coding team what can each boss do.

    3)Animations of the mobs spells. No, a phrase that just describe it doesn’t cut it.

    4)Loot. Names, illustrations, drop rates, stats, name of the mob(s) that drops it. People don’t go to beat monsters just because, you know.

    5)Specific about the mobs. Health and size of the mana/rage/energy/whatever that they got, and pathing (How they move and what road they take).

    (Note that both 4 and 5 involve long spreadsheets).

    In general, is nice. As a boss kill guide. But as a plane of a dungeon it just doesn’t cut it. Not even close.

    So design, in general, isn’t hard, it just require time. But, as IainC said, design taking in account the hardware and software limitations AND describing everything that a game has it is hard. I stand corrected in that.

    I say that a dungeon design has around 100-200 pages. A Blizzard raid? Around 300, if not more. Note that this is a wild guess, but I consider, at least the former a good one.

  • Freakazoid

    When Joe first posted, I just about fell out of my seat, because obviously I was thinking of the Joe who ran waterthread and was hired by themis group. All he did was inherit Lum’s diaspora for a while and it landed him a pseudo-MMO related job.

    Remember, for every “realist” who tells you to man up and work on… cell phone games? hahahaha– Just think of the lucky few who got into the biz soley from ranting and/or playing MMOs. If you rant hard enough and play dedicatedly enough, it could be you someday!

  • Gx1080

    If anybody wants to give specifics about that, it would be very helpful.

  • Gx1080

    @Freakazoid

    Your ideals were good, back in the 90′s. Now with HIGH DEFINITION VIDEO, NEW AND EXCITING GAMEPLAY, CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY and let’s not forget the BOOB RENDERING CAPABILITIES OF TOMORROW(that never gets old)….you need to have the means to make the game.

    The industry has changed, has matured and now there are millions of dollars on stake. Just ranting, dreaming and playing isn’t enough.

    About specifics on “how long are the design documents”, they still would be nice.

  • Freakazoid

    MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ARE AT STEAK!

    Nevermind that similar arguments were used ten years ago to describe the ten years previous’ concerns about getting into the gaming industry. Nope never happened this is a new and unique argument to this generation’s gaming.

  • Axecleaver

    It’s clear from reading that guy’s blog that he’s looking for his first job in the professional world. Aces for dreaming big but this reminds me of the college grads who respond to my entry-level developer postings asking for $80k and a company car because “I was top of my class and that’s what you need to do to land me.”

    There is a name for those guys who apply for detail-oriented jobs and send you the wrong cell number in their resumes – we call them the unemployed.

  • Joe

    Axecleaver, actual, curious question to you, as an employer — what does being top of your class get you, when applying for their first job with you? A leg up, if anything? A bit of extra notice? An ever-so-slightly higher offer?

    @Freakazoid

    “”Remember, for every “realist” who tells you to man up and work on… cell phone games? hahahaha– Just think of the lucky few who got into the biz soley from ranting and/or playing MMOs. If you rant hard enough and play dedicatedly enough, it could be you someday!”"

    Yeah, learning to be innovative and make the most out of a limited framework isn’t a way to learn or anything. Lego blocks are only good for kids if those kids are total pussies. And it’s not like there’s any market for iPhone apps or anything. Man, that guy who recently cleared $1,000,000+ in sales at $2.99 each with a mediocre iPhone remake of the old Scorched Earth shareware should have read this comment thread before he wasted his time.

    (And no, not that Joe. Common name and whatnot. But emulating his path is about like buying lottery tickets because you know someone who once won $50 from a scratcher.)

  • Joe

    “”There is a name for those guys who apply for detail-oriented jobs and send you the wrong cell number in their resumes – we call them the unemployed.”"

    Heh. Ixobelle, might want to edit that out before google caches it.

  • http://rawasaur.livejournal.com Rawrasaur

    “The devil’s in the details” and all that. I pretty much agree with the stuff Gx1080 posted about what’s missing, and would like to add a few other things, like:

    Most importantly, there needs to be map sketches for the entire zone, to scale, with descriptions including sizes of all terrain and appropriate geometry. Trying to get a raid to spread out in a 500×500 room is very different than a 5000×5000 room.

    Numerics involved for the expected raid composition. How it scales for both 10 and 25-man encounters. Are there hard modes like the last several raids? How does it work? Achievements associated with the dungeon. What sorts of quests are involved with the dungeon? Where is the dungeon? What sort of lead-in events there might be? Any special mechanics that need to be involved (time delayed content rollout, etc.?)

    Generally, Gx1080 is about right. A design document should answer all the questions anyone who reads it and has to implement it would ask, from “What colors are the laser beams?” to “How far from the door to the orb of mind control?” The goal of a successful design document is to keep people from asking you questions that stop them from doing their jobs.

    –Rawr

  • gyrus

    Fair enough on what could have been included.
    I agree that a ‘drop list’ could have been included.
    And maps, to scale, too.
    Although, this is WoW, so I wouldn’t have bothered with art and animations myself (not withstanding that I suck at this) as their resources to do this outstrip anyone I imagine.

    OTOH though this is the dilemma faced by players presenting ideas to their piers (other players – since I have become a complete cynic and no longer believe Devs listen)
    How much to include in your idea?
    To little and players are told they haven’t thought it through.
    To much and it’s “tl;dr”

    In some ways it’s a little sad – because there are Gamers out there who have some very good ideas and can contribute – and some games that desperately need it!

  • gyrus

    As an aside, I have been reading Bartle’s “Designing Virtual Worlds” lately and some Developers would do well just to read that.

  • Angelworks

    I dunno – some of the industries most famous designers came from nowhere. Jeff Kaplan for example previous job experience seems to have been “hardcore raider” and ranting about EQ bugs or their guilds glory..

    The one Lineage 2 designer I met used to be a GM. So don’t give up!

Newer Comments →