What does a technical designer do, and how does games education shake out in a modern context? How does design-oriented programming like prototyping really look as part of the game production process? Jo Cronk is a software engineer and UX specialist with over two decades of professional experience in the tech industry. From their start at Microsoft working on titles like Age of Empires 2, Age of Empires: Rise of Rome, Urban Assault, Outwars, Pandora’s Box, Close Combat III, Motocross Madness 2, the MSN Gaming Zone, and Asheron’s Call they went on to build a unique career as a technical designer at renowned studios like Crystal Dynamics, Snowblind Studios, and Popcap Games. They are now inspiring the next generation of students at Digipen Institute of Technology and channeling that opportunity into a constant source of personal growth and advancement. In this episode, you’ll deepen your understanding of game engineering, game production, game design, and game education.
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Key Quotes
“The first place where I worked as a technical designer, in practice, was at Crystal Dynamics on Tomb Raider Legend, and a lot of what I was doing day to day was working with the main physics programmer and implementing physics puzzles in the game. But the other part was generally meeting with the designers and the artists and trying to figure out what their normal sort of like workflows were, and coming up with tools to help automate some of that kind of stuff. And the next thing I knew, I had one of the company executives like in my cubicle wanting to know who I was, thanking me for helping them save a lot of money. So that was kind of cool as a fresh faced junior engineer.”
“When I was doing technical design work, I was expected to be this hybrid programmer designer who was mostly just writing a ton of code, but then also having some say in design decisions, even if I wasn’t the person who was predominantly responsible for the design. I really enjoyed doing that type of work. Rapid prototyping is something that I would get tasked with pretty often: usually there would be some random design document somewhere that would be hopefully mostly complete. Then I would create this really fast prototype with not the most optimized code or anything, and then we would try to get it done quickly so we could put it in front of people and figure out if we’re even going to keep that feature.”
“One of the things that I do in my prototyping classes at DigiPen is make them do documentation upfront, and they hate it. A lot of people don’t really see the value in it at first until they go through the entire process. As freshmen, they don’t necessarily see it right away. But I’ll have conversations with the students in their junior or senior year, and they’re like, “That was really helpful for me later on, working on these much more complicated projects than the things we were doing in those introductory classes.” I just hope they can take that into the industry, and if they work somewhere that doesn’t value pre-production, maybe they can be champions for that cause out in the world somewhere.“
“I know a bunch of younger people who are trying to start their own indie game studios right now. My recommendation for them would be: OK, whoever is going to be the figurehead, your chief, you need to do some research into how to run a business and how to do biz dev types of things; potentially just have someone who is dedicated to that type of work. Because when we were doing a lot of our dog and pony shows, there was a span of six months where the three of us, we did zero engineering work. We were getting even farther behind in our own scheduled plans, because we were constantly doing demos. It was such a waste of time.”
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