Source
r/gamedesign•
a_nice_function

Advice needed to strengthen a System Design portfolio.

Question

Hello everyone!

I was hoping if I could get some advice from you all, I'm a System Designer & I want to strengthen my portfolio with some System Design focused projects. Currently, the only thing I can currently think of is making something like a XCOM-like type of game (think Enemy Unknown or XCOM 2).

My line of thinking is that by creating a XCOM-like type of game I could potentially create smaller systems that can interact with each other. In Unreal, there are pre-made "packages" that has the movement/input/camera already done & I could focus on the system part of the project.

That's what I'm currently thinking but I'm unsure if that kind of project is a good idea & as I stated earlier, I was hoping to get some advice/opinions if my line of thinking is correct or if I should look at something else instead.

Have a good day!

EDIT: For me, System Design would be dealing with: economy, progression, balancing/tuning, flow, points or stats of a game.

Posted Nov 5, 2022, 8:58 AM UTC · edited

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adrixshadowJack of All Trades•

For a XCOM like game and interesting research and prototyping project you can do, is the use of Dijkstra Maps/Influence Maps with various tags and information type layers for the purpose of creating complex AI behaviour and interactions.

My intuition is that something like this could be achieved dynamically on the fly if there is enough analysis of the levels and you can cram as much data into those influence maps.

In other words it's not so much about how you "engineer" the "perfect AI", but what kind of behaviour can emerge if you properly utilize those kind of information layers.

Those kind of maps should give an AI and awareness and understanding of the level that I think is lacking in most games.

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a_nice_functionOP•

For a XCOM like game and interesting research and prototyping project you can do is the use of Dijkstra Maps/Influence Maps with various tags and information type layers for the purpose of creating complex AI behaviour and interactions.

Out of curiosity, is there some analysis of how the AI works in modern XCOM? I'm familiar with both Dijkstra & A-star but it would be interesting to see how it works.

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adrixshadowJack of All Trades•

Out of curiosity, is there some analysis of how the AI works in modern XCOM?

No clue, but again the goal is not to find the perfect AI, AI mods probably already found what is best, it's exploring what you can do with all those maps.

In other words it's about finding interesting "behaviour", an ants in a colony could be considered stupid individually but it has an interesting behaviour.

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a_nice_functionOP•

OpenXCOM/XCOMFiles

Is OpenXCOM a type of mod?

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a_nice_functionOP•

thank you for clarifying!

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phantasmaniacGame Designer•

being a system designer, you gotta have the ability to design the whole game system. You don't even need to code or anything, just write down the paper sim for your potential employers to present your ideas would be enough.

Now I have to be clear, this is how I would hire a system designer myself if I want to make a bigger team. I don't want to bad mouth a lot of big companies but a lot of them either don't have a proper system designer or just used their general designers to do the job instead. Hence the bad results.

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MeaningfulChoicesGame Designer•

This might make sense for a programming position, but this was about a design role in a design forum! System designers don't write APIs, create databases, or deal with encryption. Designers make the rules, systems, and content of game and systems designers focus specifically on the more numerical aspects of games and how complex systems interact rather than things like feature or level design.

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MeaningfulChoicesGame Designer•

You don't need to build a whole game to show off systems design ability. You can make an economy model in a Google spreadsheet and link to it, create a tool that shows different damage outputs and expected lifetime for units if you tweak numbers, write a quest for an RPG that considers the current power/level of the player character and scales appropriately without being too easy to making it unrewarding to level up.

Keep in mind no one's actually playing the games in your portfolio except for possibly the final round of interviews. A single stage of an XCom style game is a lot more efficient as a portfolio piece than spending years making your own. Of course games in your history are best, but you'd rather work with other people for those than worry about the code packages at all.

For the most part, system design is a specialization within game design. So you get your first more general/content game design job(s) with your portfolio, then you get more systems related tasks as you progress your career. At some point your portfolio should be your list of released games, and not separate projects.

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a_nice_functionOP•

A single stage of an XCom style game is a lot more efficient as a portfolio piece than spending years making your own. Of course games in your history are best, but you'd rather work with other people for those than worry about the code packages at all.

A single stage is what I was thinking as proof of concept, to me it would be insanity to create a whole game. Currently, I have one piece on my portfolio where I did System Design but I don't feel it's enough.

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MeaningfulChoicesGame Designer•

Whether that's enough depends on what jobs you're applying to right now and what other professional experience you have. I've been a systems designer for most of my career, and I've never had a specific systems design example in a portfolio. I found very few entry level jobs in this specialization, and by the time I was applying (or being head hunted) for those, pretty much all my examples were from the professional work I'd done as a designer.

If you're already an employed game designer you should be looking for examples of system design in your day job, not working on separate projects. Any time you playtest and tweak numbers, discuss with a lead how this feature will interact with other ones, look at player analytics to figure out how to balance something, write models and sims to test content, all of that is what you bring to systems designer interviews.

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a_nice_functionOP•

If you're already an employed game designer you should be looking for examples of system design in your day job, not working on separate projects.

Sadly I'm not currently employed, hence why I was looking for ideas to expand my portfolio. I would prefer making a playable (or anything really) example where I can expand my System Design knowledge & say "Hey, here's some system design examples/projects that I've made".

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MeaningfulChoicesGame Designer•

Well then, that brings me back to something I said at the top: are you really finding a lot of entry level systems design job postings? Typically things with that title are looking for a little more experience and you should be looking for associate and junior game design and content design positions.

Whenever you’re job hunting make sure you’re checking out opportunities first and tailoring your application towards them. If you link to some of the junior system design openings you’re seeing I might be able to give better advice on a portfolio project that would fit those roles specifically.

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PhilippTheProgrammer•

IMO the genre that leads most to system design and requires very little expertise outside of it are management games. All you need to do development-wise is build the UI. The rest is designing and implementing interlocking system.

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Beautiful-Fondant391•

This depends on what you currently have in your portfolio. Have you shipped any games before in a system design capacity?

You could make an xcom type of game - however the bulk of work you'd have to put in here is in art and programming. Even if you make heavy use of pre-made assets and plugins. Design will only make up a small part of the workload for a project as big as this.

Generally speaking, card games or board games allow you to focus more on design rather than technical implementations. They can be a good addition to a system design portfolio - however only if you already have shipped games in your portfolio to begin with.

I think that if you already have shipped games, it would be more interesting to add lofi prototypes and case studies for specific design approaches. E.g. exploring different balancing methodologies for a tactics game, or proposing a novel matchmaking system for a competitive card battler. Something that allows you to present yourself as an expert on the subject matter.

This can only compliment your portfolio if you already have professional experience as a system designer, however. If you don't, then shipping games is what you need to prioritize. Still then, a fully fledged xcom-like is a bit ambitious. Perhaps try to go for a vertical slice instead that has very limited content.

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