Game designer
I graduated! Hooray! Lets bring that into perspective.
Four-and-a-half years ago I started at the Utrecht School of the Arts (or Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht – HKU – in Dutch). I was 16 years old when I got accepted for the course Game Design & Development and I was barely capable of doing anything. I recall I called myself an artist during those days, as my only skill was a bit of photoshop. Fellow students were a lot more mature than I was (they probably still are) and I had to fight to keep up. Maybe I was a bit too young when I started, but I made it through nevertheless. I was a bit less of the typical ‘student’, you could say.
I must say I can not recall all lectures and projects in those first two years, although I did take extensive notes during each and every one of them. I remember how I managed to fuck up my first exercise, the ‘perfect a4′ exercise, in which all you had to do was turn in a blank A4 with your name, a date, the lecturer’s name and some other data – I got the date wrong. I get the exercise now, though: it is about the experience of the paper. Just one person aced the test back then, I now understand why he did. Correct information is just part of the deal, feel is the rest.
I remember I learned how to make low-poly 3D models from Kent Kuné, who later became the most influential game designer in my career. I made a pirate-tricycle for his lessons which was pretty awesome. I remember programming Tic Tac Toe in C++ for this bare-footed programming lecturer, something I currently cannot reproduce. I remember interaction design and psychology lessons which were too theoretical to be of practical value. I remember this awesome level design workshop which my team and I nailed with a fantastic looking Team Fortress 2 level.
There were a few visionaries at the HKU too. These people taught me how to differentiate game mechanics from other parts of a game. And why ‘serious’ games should not be called that way (but rather applied games, because they should be fun).
But the biggest memory that remains is that I did not finish a single game in the first two years. I had not learned how to make games at all. I remember realizing that. It was pretty painful. But ending the two first years also marked the end of the theoretical side of the Game Design & Development course. Practical exercises were coming up!
What changed everything was my internship at W!games, now Vanguard Entertainment, where I worked on Gatling Gears for half a year as part of my third year internship. I learned very valuable lessons there which completely defined the designer I currently am. I learned to see challenges in tasks which I understood fully. For all my life I had been quitting on tasks after I figured out on how to do it. Thankfully my mentor René Derks recognized this problem and I took his advise with grace. I learned to separate emotions from design from lead game designer Chris Nengerman, who brilliantly stepped back from any discussion when it became a fierce discussion and went back to every person separately to calmly talk about it.
But most of all, I saw Kent Kuné building games in his spare time. He knew a bit how to script with the Unity3D game engine and was able to create any prototype he wanted. Every week, he would show me a new version of something. I was amazed, completely inspired to work with the Unity3D to build some of my own ideas. It was pretty tough in the beginning, but it was definitely a beginning! Kent showed me the importance of having your own tools and testing your own ideas. Games can only be fun when they can be played. I can not imagine what I would be doing now without this knowledge.
After my internship, I refined my scripting skills with the half-year student project Vogels!, which turned out to be pretty successful in terms of health games. I did not learn a lot from Vogels! in particular. Keeping it simple was the main message, but it was during this project that I started to think about the meaning of experience in the context of games. That my games were being played by real people with real thoughts and experiencing their own thing. And that everything they did wrong was my fault. An important realisation, especially when you want to grow as a game designer.
Although making games for handicapped people felt immensely good, I wanted to focus more on entertaining games. My fourth year’s project, The Jelly Reef, was a great introduction to exactly that, but surprisingly taught me more about managing other people than about game design. It taught me about intrinsic motivation of myself and others, leaving others with responsibility, communication and – most of all – I learned about working hard the hard way.
It was during this project I had my so-called ‘burnout.’ I remember I worked on either the project or a project of my own every minute I was awake, for two straight weeks. My body literally stopped me from continuing like that. I have been learning how to deal with hyperventilation, stress and adrenaline ever since. It’s coming along slowly, but my struggle is becoming less.
The Jelly Reef was a great product of the extra miles some of us took to make the game the way it is. All of the team deserves credit for that. Some people in the team really did prove themselves and these are very likely the people I will be working with even after graduation.
And then, of course, my graduation project. The HKU offers a special program, that I still fail to understand, in which you stick 3 more months onto your Bachelor project plus a bigger paper (a so-called supportive narrative) to make it a Master project. My supportive narrative turned out to be a good insight into my way of thinking as a designer: analyzing a problem, coming up with solutions, building those solutions, testing those solutions and then drawing a conclusion.
Right now, it is too early to reflect on the game I have been working on during my graduation project, Fingle. It is still not done, but it definitely will be soon, and a reflection can then be found on my blog. A full blown iPad game. My first commercial title. The first of many, I hope. I couldn’t have wished for a better ending at the HKU than to graduate with this game. It is a true piece of art, if I may say so myself. I can’t wait to tell you everything about it, but that has to wait for a bit longer, unfortunately!
And then, suddenly, I graduate.
Adriaan de Jongh,
Master of Arts in Design for Digital Cultures
Together with my friend Bojan Endrovski, I will be starting a game studio.
Hello world