Obsessive Compulsive Designer?

This month Billy tells us why he’s nuts. In a really good way. But still nuts.

Most of the guys I work with think I have a minor strain of OCD. It’s a weird one for me as I never gave it any thought until they started slagging me off about my little quirks. Don’t get me wrong I’m not constantly scrubbing away at my hands under boiling water or anything, but if I’m honest they probably have a point. If it is in fact a form of OCD, it definitely takes a more benign form, like my constant desire for symmetry in level design, my need to create task lists and tick them off when complete, my constant nagging insistence on consistency, my endless nitpicking about pretty much anything I’m presented with, my inability to go out wearing creased clothes and my weird lining things up problem, that I won’t bore you with. All of which give my work mates a lot of opportunities to point and laugh.

For this month’s column I’ll talk less about game design principles and more about my little habits, how I think they can have both a positive and negative effect on my work as a designer and how I believe every good game designer must have a little bit of an OCD deep down in them somewhere, as must many of the gamers we tend to call ‘the hardcore’.

Symmetrically Inclined

Symmetry has always seemed to make sense to me visually, which can be both a hindrance as well as help for a designer. I’ve always loved symmetry in architecture, which made creating well balanced multiplayer levels nice and simple for me, I didn’t constantly feel the need to shake things up from base to base and everyone knows the best levels tend to be mirror images, so I was made for the job. The problem hit me when I had to branch out and do location designs focused on multiple approaches, that’s when I had to reign in my love for symmetry and go off-piste, which was difficult at first, but I think I did a decent job in the end.

Ticking the Boxes

I think everyone loves ticking off completed tasks on a list. It makes you feel like you’re doing something worthwhile, making progress, achieving something. Which is why the Xbox 360’s Achievement and Gamerpoints feature was a dream come true for me.

The need to create a list of minor tasks for players to complete with gamer points as a reward may have felt like a chore to some designers but it was a joy for me. Creating all the cool little off the wall Achievements was great fun on Crackdown, and it’s something that I hope I can do in every game I make from this point forward, I just need to make sure I don’t alienate the gaming public with too many hidden orb type Achievements.

Consistency is Crucial

Inconsistency quite simply eats away at me. As you’ll learn I have many pet hates, but inconsistency has to be in my top 1. It really drives me nuts! I like games that are consistent through the entire product, game controls, UI design, box art, marketing material, merchandise, even fonts if I can get away with it. To be fair, very few games get this right, although the GTA franchise is a great example of how this can be done very, very well. I’ve personally never managed to work on a game that’s nailed this yet, but I’m certainly doing my best to tick that box off my list.

Nit Picking Nightmare

Personally I think this is one of my most annoying habits – as my work mates will likely confirm – but I also think it makes me far more effective at my job, not so much in the design sense it’s more to do with my inability to settle for something that I just don’t think is up to scratch. This inability makes me far more inclined to keep fighting for a feature, bug fix or tweak than some other people, as they’ll generally grow weary of the endless arguments and compromise or leave it alone entirely, while I only seem to get more frustrated and more determined to get my way. While I believe this single minded approach can be of massive benefit it can also be an issue if taken too far. Too many games never see the light of day because the person in charge of the vision simply won’t compromise leading to massive slippage in the schedule which can ultimately lead to the game being cancelled. So while it’s one of my most effective quirks, I occasionally need a level headed producer to tell me I’m being an idiot and leave it alone. You know who you are. :D

There are clearly no revolutionary design theories here, but I do think that most of us game designers and hardcore gamers must all have our own minor forms of OCD that manifest in different ways, whether or not they make us better designers or gamers is all down to how far we let them off the leash.

Billy Thomson is the creative director of newly-formed developer Ruffian Games. Billy has over 13 years experience of designing video games, including design roles on Grand Theft Auto and GTA2, before working as lead designer on Realtime Worlds’ celebrated Crackdown.

This article was originally published in issue 94 of Develop Magazine. http://www.developmag.com/