Game design is one of the few sectors that has grown steadily over the past two decades. It is an art that only creative minds can master.
Certain things like user interface, level-based difficulty, and color combinations play an important role in the success of a game, and professionals can do a better job of choosing all of these things.
Popular game companies such as EA Sports, Ubisoft, and Bandai Namco Games have long started developing games for smartphones. Most of these companies also outsource some of their game development.
Outsourced Game Designer
Of course, it’s good to have a dedicated designer who makes the final decision and keeps the design true to the original idea. This includes making sure that any new ideas that come to fruition really add to the experience and make it more engaging.
The most important advantage of outsourcing is that it is very cheap and affordable. When you only need an employee for a short period of time, outsourcing may be the best option. You don’t have to pay full salaries to in-house specialists while waiting for the next project, and hiring a corporate expert for a temporary project can be costly because of training, adaptation, and salary costs.
Outsourcing also saves a lot of time because when you outsource, you are working with qualified professionals who are experts in their respective fields, and you don’t have to spend time finding and training people. When you hire an outsourcing Game Development Company, the costs are very low because they provide you with a team of qualified professionals, and the responsibility of managing the talent pool falls entirely on the service provider.
In addition to avoiding the huge burden of hiring new resources, outsourcing completely reduces overhead costs. The overhead costs of paying, as well as buying new equipment and software, outsourcing helps reduce all of these additional costs.
How to Improve Outsourced Game Design
If you’re an outsourcing game design company, you should pay attention to a few important tips to improve the quality of your work:
- A short prototype is worth a small number of words. A design document consisting of raw text leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Any number of words cannot accurately convey the expected feeling of the game. Try to be more concise.
- Study all of the documents. Everyone is busy on the game development team. No one wants to read long and convoluted texts. Heavy documents are the bane of all employees, especially on big projects.
- Write with your colleagues or peers in mind. As designers, we write design documentation for others. It could be a client, a manager, a developer… Everyone has different needs and expectations. The client may not care about the details of the technology you choose to implement. On the other hand, your development teammates will probably need some details to assess the technical constraints that will result from your choices. In other words, you must tailor both your tone and content to your readers. Part of your role as a game designer is to understand your fellows and their needs.
- Tests. This item is among the first on this list. Your ideas leave room for interpretation and discussion. This is especially true for clients who don’t work in the game industry. They may not like a consistent and effective design if they don’t have a chance to see the final game first.
- Do your research at the beginning of the day. Finding new ideas is a task that requires a lot of effort. It can tire you out in a matter of hours. Bouncing between conceptual research, programming, drawing, and writing will make you tired. This is a general productivity tip: If you want to stay efficient for a full 8 hours a day, you need a short-term work plan.
This list of 5 rules will help every game designer always stay productive.