Nigel Kershaw - Online Producer @ Deep Silver Dambuster Studios

Today’s guest lecture was Nigel Kershaw, an online producer at Deep Silver Dambuster Studios. Nigel has been working in the games industry since 1989 where he started as a designer at Imagitec Design. Throughout his career in the games industry he has worked on multiple AAA titles such as Motorstorm and Broken Sword, his roles ranged from lead games designer to game director at different studios.

Nigel is asked repeatedly the question; ‘What do games designers actually do?’ This marked the main importance of the presentation for today’s guest lecture. Nigel began to explain that it is not so easy to answer this certain question, but the main answer is the word ‘play’. This particular word can be split up into multiple sub-sections to understand it more relevantly, these are: defining, communicating and creating.

With the job of being a games designer comes the responsibility of generating game ideas, this specific part of the job is something that will come naturally to all. Creating game ideas is something that everybody can do, ideas will come naturally and in different amounts, learning to filter through the ideas to find the one that is most feasible is a great task and has to be perfected. Ideas are cheap when it comes to the creation of a video game, therefore they should be treated as cheap, letting go of ideas is a massive accomplishment as a games designer as ideas hold very little value.

"A great idea is meaningless. A great idea that leverages your existing technology, gets the team excited, is feasible to do on time and budget, is commercially competitive, and, last but not least, floats the boat of a major publisher... Now you have something." - Ken Levine

The above quote from Ken Levine, founder of Irrational Games substantiates my view of how you need to filter through your ideas to find the one that fits and is worth creating. Ken describes that if an idea gets the team excited and captures the eye of the publishers then you have something. In my opinion too many games aren't filtered through this process and jump straight into the depths of development, this is a massive loss as there has already been a lot of effort put into the project for it to be canned last minute. This results in millions of dollars being spent in the production phase for it to all be wasted as the project is not what they expected due to poor planning or prototyping. Games being cancelled half way through the development phase have become extremely common throughout the past in the games industry. For example Prey 2 a sequel of the original 2006’s Prey created by Human Head Studios was in the middle of development before the plug was pulled due to not being up to their standards.

“It was the game we believed in, but we never felt that it got to where it needed to be – we never saw a path to success if we finished it. It wasn't up to our quality standard and we decided to cancel it,” – Pete Hines This shows that even the most popular games and their companies can take a turn for the worst if the planning and schedule is not correct and doesn't match the quality of the project.

References: Nigel Kershaw, (2015), Photo [Online]. Available at: https://media.licdn.com/media/p/1/005/09c/0c9/35db2c3.jpg [Accessed 24 April 15]. Nic Healey (2014) Bethesda confirms Prey 2 cancelled. Blog [Online]. Available from: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/bethesda-confirms-prey-2-cancelled/ [Accessed 24 April 15]. Bob Colayco (2005) So You Wanna Be a Games Designer. Gamespot [Online]. Available from: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/so-you-wanna-be-a-game-designer/1100-6129276/ [Accessed 24 April 15]. Keith Stuart (2012) Genius or elimination: where do good game ideas come from?. The Guardian [online]. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2012/jan/20/where-do-game-ideas-come-from [Accessed 24 April 15].