When it comes to graphics, everybody has an opinion – it doesn’t matter if you’re a coder, tester, designer, producer, or tea boy. It requires absolutely no qualifications to look at something and decide whether or not you like it. It requires slightly more skill to determine why you like or dislike something but we all get some ability to that end just by being alive for a reasonable period of time.
So this means that, especially early on in a game’s development, it’s the artists who are doing the things that most people are interested in. New concepts going up on the walls, a new character model, a pretty sunset for the skydome. It’s an unfortunate truth that the only people who particularly care that a programmer is writing a particularly elegant function is other programmers.
So unless you’re the special effects programmer or are responsible for enabling exciting new engine functionality, you have a diminished set of people that really care about what you’re doing.
Of course, on the flip side, while as an artist it’s very nice that mid-way through the creation of one of the player characters you get plenty of attention from everybody wandering past on their way for a smoke and/or coffee, it’s less nice when they remark that what you’re doing looks a bit shit. Because, of course, while everyone can recognise the difference between things they like and dislike, not everyone is particularly informed as to what a really good character model might look like when it’s only ten percent complete.
This only gets more severe when it comes to design.
The trouble with designing, is that not only does pretty much everybody in the building have an idea of what it is about games they think makes them good or bad, but there’s also less people for them to blame when they think something’s awful.
If a programmer fires up the latest build and thinks that the screen looks a bit iffy, any particular artist can at least claim that it’s the lighting, or the environment, or anything else that they didn’t personally do (or that who did is currently present) that is the problem before skulking back to their desks to repair the ropey skin weighting on their model.
But as a designer in a similar position, the best you can do is blame the implementation of your idea which isn’t exactly the best way to endear yourself with the programming team. Alternatively, you could blame the other designers but then, if it’s a mid – to – small sized project, there’s a good chance that there aren’t any. If you say nothing and skulk back to your desk to repair the flaw in the design document, it’s going to be pretty obvious what you’ve done since you’ll have to tell everybody that the document has been updated. No, there’s really no option but to suck it up and either attempt to convince everyone that what you’ve designed is correct, or admit error then and there.
The first option will annoy people if they all think you’re obviously wrong and therefore just being stubborn and the latter will cause people to start questioning why on Earth you’re responsible for the design. All paths lead to everybody hating the designer and you’re screwed.
The only way out of this situation is to be the sort of designer that everyone likes regardless of how good or bad you are at actually designing. If you’ve reached a design position via testing and QA, there’s a good chance that everyone in the studio already hates you, so this is the kind of approach that needs to be planned for well in advance (and would be a whole new blog topic – how to be a tester and have people know who you are without it being because they hate you).
The less time you’ve been at the company, the less work you have to do – especially if you join a company which already employs a bunch of designers everyone hates. In this case all you need to be is something approaching reasonably normal to surprise the hell out of everyone in the studio and put you on their good side. Immediately start whinging about the other designers in this event, otherwise the team will get suspicious and you’ll lose your advantage.
In either case, you could start smoking and/or drinking huge quantities of coffee so that you’re always present to hear what everybody else in the studio is whinging about. Hopefully, it’s time constraints, team size, or management decisions. If it’s you they’re whinging about then they are less likely to do so if you’re stood next to them offering cigarettes and so, if you’re lucky, they’ll start complaining about something or somebody else. At this point, join in.
Glad I could help!