This article is part of the Get Into Games feature presentation. Check out the rest of the series for a complete look into the reality of getting a gaming career, as told to us by some of the industry’s best talent.

Often likened to movie directing and doubly misunderstood, the job of designing games involves more than just emerging from your office to cast lightning bolts of inspiration across the studio. Nothing annoys artists and engineers more than someone who knows their games but refuses to get their hands dirty. And while larger team sizes and intuitive tools have all but removed the need for designers to know their code, there’s a tenet of the job that’s now more important than ever: always be learning, because you can never know enough. Tony Davis, lead designer at Crytek, shows us the ropes.

How did you find your way into design?

I wanted to be a 3D artist, so I had my Amiga and was making demo floppy disks in the early ’90s. Eventually, I built a website, and it was a remake of a game from the ’80s called Carrier Command; I mocked up the graphics in 3D Studio Max. I got some interest, was interviewed by PC Zone in the UK, and that website alone got me talking to a guy who was talking to Crytek. He was actually remaking Elite. This was before Crytek had an office – it was just a few guys and some mailing lists. And I thought: If this guy can get a job, maybe I can too.

So one cheeky Sunday afternoon, I sent an email to this bloke Cevat [Yerli, Crytek cofounder], and said: ‘If you’re looking for a 3D artist, I’m your man’. And he emailed me back the same day and said: ‘Well, we don’t have any positions for 3D artists right now but we do need a game designer’. I didn’t know anything about game design but was told that was fine: I could pick it up as I went along. What I didn’t realise was that there were no 3D artists and there were no programmers. But that website showed I could think along those lines, and it got me in. So when I went out to Germany in November 2000, I was employee number two. Employee number one beat me by a couple of days, so I’m a bit annoyed about that.

What’s in a day’s work for a designer?

We do the Agile development system here so we have a ‘scrum’ on a month-by-month basis. At the beginning of the month, everyone agrees on what they’re going to work on and they get a list of items from the producer. So people will come in and continue what they were doing before, which is basically firing up our editor, positioning trees, positioning enemies and playtesting. We have a stand-up every day, so each group of seven or eight people will get together for 15 minutes at around 11am, and we talk about what we did yesterday and what we’ll do today. That way, everyone gets an idea of what everyone else is working on; no one disappears off for three weeks and then pops up and surprises everyone.

Later, we’ll get together in a conference room for an hour and get people from the rest of the company – R&D programmers, say, who don’t really have an idea of what the game’s about – and write down what they’re feeling as they play. Then the level designers will get together as a group and talk about that experience. What we end up with is a situation where the game talks to us through these people and tells us what it wants to be.

What are the basic misconceptions about the designer’s role?

We’ve had candidates come to Crytek who’ve billed themselves as game designers, and their tool of choice is Microsoft Word. They think that they can write documents and that the rest of us poor schmucks will execute their vision. The role of game designer doesn’t really exist at Crytek; we have a lead designer, of course, and writing Word documents is his job. But the thing is that we have our own tools, and we even shipped those with the Crysis demo. So when people come to me and I say, “Well, what do you think of the Crytek editor?”, if they have a blank look on their face then I start to think they should’ve done their homework.

What’s the ideal portfolio for an aspiring videogame designer?

Get involved in a mod – for any engine. If you can demonstrate that you can make something in Valve’s Hammer editor, you can transfer those skills across to the CryEngine. We have the CryMod.com community, so get involved in that. Make a webpage, get screenshots up, make a couple of levels and play around with it. Make it so that, if we interview you, you can talk about the work.