A lot goes into making a game, and each game and designer has a different mix of focus and needs for their games. Off the top of my head we have: world building, rules creation, technical and prose writing, art, layout and visual design, feedback and iteration, promotion and marketing, and community support skills.
Collaboration and contracting are good ways to make up for weaknesses, but so is practice and patience.
So what are you best at? What are you working on improving?
I am pretty good at creating a compelling plotline for my players to follow. I think the heart of a good driving conflict is proper motivation. I make antagonists that have clear motivations that fit the plot and world we are playing in.
I am currently trying to get better at drawing so that I can give my worlds a little more flavor than just a bunch of descriptive text.
I can honestly say that two years ago, when I started making tilesets for my game, it went horribly. Tried a lot of things because how else can you learn. Things that felt logical to me in my head, but ultimately looked terrible. Some things I was so bad at, it actually ended up looking good in a way I hadn’t intended, if you follow me. After almost two years of practicing my techniques, I have gotten much better at it. I can certainly attest that practice pays off.
One of the things I am fantastic at is cadd. I’m a designer by trade and I’ve spent the last 30 years making drawings and models. I’m great at creating non-living objects in 3D Cadd for either rendering or importing into a game engine. Artistic drawing though, ugh. I seem to have traded that for extra technical ability.
I struggle with writing. I know what I want to do, from a to z, but I struggle to write it out, organizing it, etc. The structure, not so much the content. It’s like when you move into a new place and know all the objects you own, but not so much where each object is going to reside.
