When i loaded up the game World of Warcraft i noticed an article which i thought would be good as a PPP blog post, i thought it would be good to read up on what people have to say about what a working day is like in the game design industry. This would be especially useful for me as this would be my ideal job and anything more i can know about the entire industry would be an advantage.
Lunch! Heat up the pizza I brought from home and check out some gaming sites, or whatever.
1:00pm
Jay and Steve Parker (producer) stop by my office for a quick priorities update. We look over my tasks and shuffle around priorities. I have five UI mockups in review, some at the design evaluation stage and others for tech review (mainly programming). We talk about how those UIs may impact other functionality and revise the list to accommodate.
My schedule tends to be very loose since it is affected by all three disciplines (art, design, and programming). Often times something will clear art and design only to hit a snag in tech review which causes a revision. Most of the time it's minor, but in rare cases it can mean scrapping everything and starting from scratch.
1:40pm
Wyatt Cheng (designer) stops by my office to brainstorm some UI ideas for one of his tasks. We talk through various scenarios and Wyatt puts his ideas on the whiteboard. This will be my reference point as I move forward with the UI later.
I prefer whiteboard scrawl to stuffy formal design docs as it tends to bring out the emotion of the designer. I get to see what they're really passionate about in a particular UI. A lot of that gets lost when converted to a word document.
2:10pm
Time to get some art assets into the game!
My Trade UI has been approved, so it's time to break it down into game assets.
Once a UI mockup has passed all areas of approval (Design, Art, Code) I then covert the mockup into actual game assets. It's kind of like breaking up a jigsaw puzzle into all the pieces. I put all the pieces into the game engine and let the programmers know where they are, what they're named and so on. Then I send along a coordinates image that shows where all the pieces go and how they work so that when a programmer reassembles all my pieces it looks nearly identical to my mockup.
For this reason I make my mockups game-quality art (most of the time) so that when it comes time to break it up into all the separate components I don't have to make new art. It's already done.
I send along both a sample image (the mockup) and the coordinates image so the programmer can see what the final UI should look like. This is a helpful reminder because sometimes things get moved around in the schedule and the layout may not be fresh in the mind of, or even familiar to, the programmer assigned to implementing the UI.
To me this sounds like a pretty awsome day of work, i know i would love to work on a game i am interested in, to make it my own and add my own style to a gameplay experience. I have found this study a very good insight into what a day working in the game industry is like and with any look want to be doing this kind of thing in to future.
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/interviews.html#firstInterview
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