Shepherd of Shepherds

I know it's been a long time since my last post, color in your own excuses.

I'm a a design lead now on a lovely little game called Oracle. We're more than half way through production and I'm working with a team of just one other designer. Still, being the lead means that I do a lot of design with the rest of the team, and it has really reformed my understanding of the people and the types of people who work in this industry.

I am a designer. Through to the core I put things together or take them apart constantly. It shapes my worldview and my understanding of life. But when something is so core to your system, it's often hard to realize that the same way of looking at the world does not, necessarily, go double for the people around you. This is one of the most important things I've come to understand in my position as lead designer, NOT EVERYONE IS A DESIGNER.

I keep thinking, "Oh, we need some animations. I bet the animators would love to concept some cool flips and attacks." But they don't. They're still creative -I have no doubt about this- but they don't want to design things. They're Builders. Their creativity comes in execution, not conception.

And the whole industry is filled with people who's great creativity is somewhere other than design. I know this as a general point of knowledge, but It's so far from my conscious thought that I tend to forget. In my mind it makes sense that an animator would design animations because I assume that everyone uses thought processes similar to my own. I assume everyone is a designer in addition to whatever it is they do. And I need to stop that.

Today, my co-designer and I were talking about the world map and we were trying to fill a design hole involving backtracking through the map without backtracking through the story. I kept trying to prompt him for an idea as I didn't want to trample on his map design, but after a few minutes he just flat out said, "I need an executive decision." He isn't a high concept designer. He's a builder with design sensibilities. He doesn't want a big blank slate, he want's someone to draw the outline so he understands what he should build. And that's more than ok, that's great. We couldn't survive without him. But it means I need to be more conscious of when I'm heaping blue sky design onto people who are, for lack of a better word, agoraphobic.

So I'm going to do just that.