How To Be A Good Game Director, Part 2

This is my second video about how to be a good game director. You can see part 1 here: • How To Be A Good Game ...
p.s. I called Michael Sheen Martin Sheen. :(

[@stelabouras]

I have recently discovered Tim's channel and all I have to say is that it feels like watching a paid masterclass. This whole channel is a gem and contains a ton of insight. Thank you for doing this Tim!

[@davyg11]

Martin Sheen is Charlie Sheen's Dad - Michael Sheen is the Welsh actor that Tim was mentioning 😂

[@MYFAVORITES5]

but who is Emilio Esteves?

[@davyg11]

@@MYFAVORITES5 Charlie Sheen's brother...

[@DirkusTurkess]

@@MYFAVORITES5 The Mighty Duck, man. I swear to God. I was, like, Emilio!

[@crankyknuckles1849]

@@MYFAVORITES5 Young Guns. Good movie:)

[@mentalheavy]

But who is Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez?

[@fafofafin]

5:15 this is why the caravan shotgun is the best weapon in new vegas. 10/10 reloading animation.

[@d.g135]

This is how I approach my experience with a video game I have yet to play, with the dual goals of trying to enjoy it and learning from it as a game designer, game director, or as a professional in the game development industry. Go in with the least amount of information about the game and the studio that developed the game as possible and play the game twice: The first time you play it as a player, trying to enjoy it and not focusing on critiquing or analyzing it as much as possible. After the game ends, you write down subjectively what you liked and what you disliked in a list. Play it a second time, trying to analyze and critique it and trying to learn the most about it. During this process, you also go search for information about the development of the game and the team who worked on it, the company, and get a general idea of what their past products look like to better understand why specific decisions were possibly made and where it could have been the result of some other dynamics within the studio. At the end, take the list of things you did enjoy and the things you did not enjoy during the first playthrough and try to analyze it further during the second playthrough, trying to understand why things were made the way they were made, if they are fundamentally bad or simply a personal preference, etc. This will take more time and effort, of course, but I think it's necessary if you want to increase your future probability of shipping successful games and helping to meet business objectives (if you are a game director) and possibly also learn to enjoy your job even more and be more understanding and tolerant of other people. P.S. I know that playing the first time as a gamer and not a professional developer is hard, as with everything, you need to train yourself by practice and adjustments, learn more about yourself and how to enter a "flow" state while playing a game in the sense of being able to experience it as a "gamer child," with the most naive state of mind for that playthrough (which can be made out of different sessions or in a big single one, or a couple of big sessions, etc. I personally find more enjoyable as I cannot focus on a game for too long during a single session). One idea for the second playthrough could be to find out what the target audience for that game you are playing is and how long they thought (the devs) a session would be for them. They should have designed the overall experience around that information, so by you knowing that, you can analyze session per session, which is also more feasible in my opinion. Generally, try to have a spontaneous approach for the first playthrough and a more systematic approach, maybe slightly different from genre to genre of video games. What do you guys think of this approach? Personally i've found it very efficient and feasible with my lifestyle over the past few years. If you try it, tell me how it goes. 🙂

[@ta0alicious]

Fallout and Fallout 2 were monumental to my adolescence and young adulthood. It's been a delight to watch this series and absorb your lessons. I've always had a weakness for para-social-type relationships, but seriously, you are the virtual uncle I never had at this point. I wait anxiously every day for the next helping. Thank you for taking the time to record these, I'm sure it would be easier to enjoy a lazy Sunday morning. It's been a pleasure to discover you are as admirable in real life as I always imagined.

[@patrickholleman9323]

Hi, Tim! Great video series. I have a lot of clients who are switching to game dev as a second career. Many of them have done very well for themselves, and are funding their game with their savings, and as such, are taking the de facto role as director. And it makes sense! It's their money; it's their vision. But if you were to do a third video, could you talk about what kind of things they should have done in preproduction before they ever approach freelance devs like me to actually build the game? There's no good "first step" for people in this position--at least not that I have found. Thanks!

[@jirikrajnak9047]

being game director means your name appears before anyone else in the credits. except for brian fargo.

[@imightbebiased9311]

One day I hope to be Lead Fargo on a game.

[@alexfrank5331]

I noticed that when Tim said "no one should know more than you," he also clarified that individual leads of narrative, programming will have more depth of knowledge. So it's not micro-managing, but more of a guiding light. I've found that it's really difficult to figuring out how much is too much vs too little on a case-by-case basis. I think it's one of those things that some people like Tim can figure out and excel at it (as he shared about his experience producing Fallout), where as for people like me, it's an eternal struggle. lol

[@imightbebiased9311]

Yeah, having a micromanaging dictator is as different type of hell, but still hell nontheless.

[@clairesteeleforever]

Exoprimal is a fantastic example of good tone. I was pretty surprised at first by how much fun I was having, but I couldn't point to any single element as being outstanding. In fact, the controller support and UI is kind of awful, which is normally a dealbreaker for me. But the gameplay is genuinely fun, and I finally realized that they just nailed the tone. The cutscenes are fun, the characters are fun, the lore element is fun (you unlock lore via regular gameplay, but it all resides in a "lore map" which you go and watch at your own pace - really great for co-op when you just wanna blast dinosaurs), and the shooting tons of time-traveling dinosaurs is FUN! I can tell a lot of work went into making sure all those elements work in sync. I always try to understand why I get annoyed while playing games. Sometimes it's mechanics that don't quite work together - or there's way too many, where I can't keep track of the core loop. Sometimes it's awful controller support or just an overall failure to engage me quickly enough. I feel like a lot of modern games don't realize how critical the first 30 minutes of gameplay is, especially in the era of Game Pass. As recently as just a few years ago, if I'm playing a game it meant that I paid $60 for it and I was in for the long haul. Now it's much more difficult for me to accept a janky/boring intro when I can just play something else.

[@aNerdNamedJames]

Thank you once again Tim. These uploads truly are invaluable.

[@kalziumbones1557]

Love this channel! Thank you Tim for your insights. I’ve recently gotten into playing fallout 1 for the first time after falling in love with the franchise when fallout 4 came out (I’m of the younger generation) and I must say it’s truly a great game. It manages to hold my attention and keep me fully immersed despite my complete lack of interest in most games that use turn based combat. Anyways I just want to say I really appreciate you making these videos as I’m interested in game development and they touch on certain things that one might not normally consider. Keep it up!

[@spartan117mit]

Hi Tim! I love all of your videos. As someone who is looking to get their second degree in game design and go into a whole load of debt to do it, aspiring to one day be that game director on media that I think will help people be better people, this video and others help give me the confidence to take the leap and go for it. Despite what others may say, I also deeply appreciated your videos about being gay in the industry as well as the prejudice you've faced - as a fellow gay man, it is good to hear both the success stories and hardships from those like me. I really like what you said about taking things critically and how you've grown to be trained to do so since it's a lot of what a director needs to do. I've tended to find myself overly critical of the media I consume, but as I orient myself closer and closer to the creative side of the work I do I've been doing it less and less and I think you'd be interested to hear why. I think it's partly to do with looking at that media as a craftsman rather than the audience, but also respecting the amount of creativity, ingenuity, and guile it took to get a product to where it is regardless of the hurdles they've faced. As I'm growing in my knowledge, I'm gaining the context I need to imagine how certain mistakes could've been made, how compromises came about, and I think it adds another element to the beauty of art that few people get to look at. My focus starting out is going to be narrative and level design, and boy howdy I know I don't have a strong affinity for coding, but I think getting the knowledge from other disciplines and the context from them, enough to really appreciate what those groups are contributing and what they have to do to get there, is incredibly valuable.

[@Qwert0mietek]

Extreme tone changes that are intentional can be a great thing. Yakuza series is a prominent example for that. The main story arcs are pretty serious most of the time but sometimes they're getting funny, the side stuff is often comical if not absurd, and all of it works really well (for some, but the series is old and popular, so there are a lot of us). In my opinion Japanese writers are great in making players (or viewers, listeneres, readers etc.) attached to the characters by the usage of humor. I believe that humor is the thing that greatly facilitates connecting to the characters, which is then improving the impact of the serious parts of the story (I'm looking at you Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni - the visual novel, another outstanding example that mixes lots of humor and serious and/or horror story moments).

[@FluffySylveonBoi]

The best sounds in Fallout are the extremely loud 14mm and 223 pistols, the dying sound after a critical hit from any gun (Shot, long enemy moan, the sound of falling on the ground) and the sound of being reduced to goo. I love them so much and they make me smile too xD

[@Anubis1101]

I haven't reached the point yet where i can't enjoy games as a player, but i am extremely critical of UI and UX. It could be because i got into web design in middle school, but interface design has always come easily to me, and it bothers me on a fundamental level when i see poorly designed or actively counter-productively designed (you see that a lot in phones, and increasingly in Windows these last few versions) interfaces, menus, or HUDs. There's been a definite downhill trend in this area over the last decade or two, and it seems people (or maybe it's companies/execs) don't take it seriously. Have you noticed any trends in game design like that, as someone who's been in it for so long?

[@GeomancerHT]

Thanks for the video! Noticed the shirt, I would call it a director/boss shirt, very good pick for the ocassion :D

[@tinyowlgames]

Super useful talk, thanks Tim!

[@stranded.comics]

Thank you for helping me get even closer to my goal. Thank you.

[@Banefane]

Look, I once worked on a project with much younger students. They felt good when they heard from their manager that they had done a good job. I made them work hard in the beginning and solve problems I had encountered at work. The end of the project felt like walking through a park. They were all proud and loved their results. If you're critical 24/7, you can be sure that people won't like it in the long run.

[@bratttn]

Tim, can you, please, make a separate video about bug prioritizing and testing? I mean even in regular software development fixing a bug could result in a functionality distortion in some other workflow that uses the "fixed" component. How do you manage emergent cascades of bugs when fixing something breaks other things or you know it would require a major overhaul of the codebase?

[@arcan762]

code testing (unit, e2e, integration...)

[@StavrosNikolaou]

Thank you for the video. How do you find the balance between the breadth of knowledge a director must have with depth in each domain one can achieve? At which point do you feel comfortable letting go of the detailed knowledge in any specific domain (especially the one closest to you like say, programming) in favor of keeping the big picture always updated? Thanks again! 😊

[@Whetold]

Hey Tim I have a question maybe you'll be able to do a video about this. Have you ever seen Fallout online made by community? It's based on F1 and F2, and soon there's gonna be Fallout online 2.

[@justjunk3803]

tim, what are some of your favorite builds in RPGs you've either made personally or just experienced on your own?

[@plaidchuck]

The biggest problem i see now is that every home user thinks they’re an up and coming director. Same with movies, everyone is just a scrappy and unknown screenwriter. Also agreed Tone is so important! That I think is one thing anyone even the end user will notice with creative media.

[@cloudzack1090]

I love energy weapons man

[@CaptainDeathbeard]

How do you handle the clash between a director/designer's iterative changes and "fixes" to tone Vs content that's already done and can't be changed without wasting work?

[@CainOnGames]

Preferably this is caught before the work is finalized. But you have identified another reason for crunch: work that is not done to spec.

[@lrinfi]

3:09 Not sure how too put this in a way that makes sense, but thinking critically about something doesn't necessarily mean condemning it as being good or bad (or evil). So-called "secular" society doesn't want to see through or acknowledge the fact, but it's inherited an awful lot of its misunderstandings and ideas regarding coming to a "judgement" about something from religion. I think that's why so many of us feel bad about seeing things as they are and/or making critical decisions that need to be made, in this case about whether or not an idea is going to make it into a game or how some element of it should be designed to remain in keeping with its overall tone or message or "user-friendliness," etc. We tend to take criticism of our work personally, but that's just the ol' ego talking. Coming to a "judgment" about something is more about choosing among possibilities - simply making a decision - than praise and condemnation. When it comes to ideas, a rather excellent description of the process is "separating the wheat from the chaff."

[@prizrak250]

Thanks! My question is how can you make you game interesting for a different type of player than you are? How can you understand them?

[@spybgon4597]

What is your opinion of recent Fallout

[@lrinfi]

So, Tim. We've been through the nuclear apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse and every other kind of apocalypse we can imagine. Postapocalyptic media, in fact, has been extremely popular since its inception for good reason: it shares themes with the apocalypse (i.e. unveiling) that is unfolding in real-time all around and within us. What are the odds, do you think, of getting a video game made today that explores the alternatives to global armageddon cropping up here and there?

[@schitzoflink8612]

I wish you were messy enough to talk about other games. I would love to hear your thoughts on Bethesda. I know you wont im just so curious what someone with game design experience thinks and not what youtubers think. Not that I dont like some of their critique videos, just that its a different perspective.

[@user-tg7pi6lu6v]

gg

[@BuzzKirill3D]

How do you do, fellow game directors?

[@busterampleforth9806]

Man, if the college experience was less terrible for neurodivergent people, game director or even just high responsibility design work would be the perfect job for a design hyperfixated autistic guy like me. I would be in there an unhealthy amount of time.

[@GypsumGeneration]

Jonathon Blow livestreamed Elden Ring AND RIPPED IT APART. I didn't really understand WHY he was SO CRITICAL of every little thing, but he criticized things I'd never think of. Things like audio balance of open world NPC dialogue vs music. His viewers gave him a lot of flack for it, me included, but after watching this video I can sympathize with him more.

[@BuzzKirill3D]

He seems like a guy with a lot to say. I quite liked his Braid back in 2008, but has he put out anything as good since?