Natsuume

Depends... The thing is games have become a much larger and more diverse industry... some games, like the small casual games Boomzap is more known for are wonderful for designers to have "complete freedom" in the sense that they are just working with small teams and small feature sets, which is a much more fertile ground for cheap, fast experimentation. So in that sense, design has gotten a lot easier - especially considering all of the tools we have at our disposal now.

However, if you are talking about big budget games - like the latest Far Cry or GTA titles, for instance... OMG. Teams of 200-300 people. Hundred million +++ budgets. Legions of producers, directors, middle managers... art teams that fill whole rooms... in that environment, doing fast, rapid change becomes extremely onerous. Just looking at the animation list for a single Assassins Creed character - you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars work in that alone... so if you then start redesigning that character's move-set... bam. you have wasted man-months of work. In this environment its very difficult to make a lot of changes.... And the meetings... oh god the meetings. In really big projects liks that, the job of designer takes on a really terrible, political dimension that I ... have no interest in. I like it over here in the smaller, more indie shallow end of the pool.

Its honestly one of the reasons innovation has really slowed down in the AAA end of the spectrum. It's just hard to make a case for making the multiple rounds of revisions that real innovation requires when each round of revisions costs potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I'm not sure I would call what is happening in indie games a "success" - what I see is a lot of people losing a lot of time and money in indie games, burning out, and leaving the industry after a couple years. Most of them much, much poorer than they started. Sure - there are successes, but for every Flappy Bird, there are 1000 games that barely made $100. (that is not hyperbole, that's real numbers)... That's not really sustainable.

The people who are really getting hit are the small-to-mid-range devs. People in 20-40 person studios, doing small titles that require real budgets to make, but don't have the big VC funding or big owning studio to eat the costs of losses if the games fail. These studios are dying very quickly - I could tell you 10 great studios like this I know right now that probably won't see the end of 2016. And even the VC funded studios - they are losing a lot of money, and the VCs are already starting to pull out. In another 2-3 years, we're going to see a massive, terrible crash, and most smaller studios will close or get bought for pennies on the dollar... and become nothing more than brand names at larger publishers - who will likely shed most if not all of the original staff. As they do.

What you will be left with is the hobbyists at one end, and the big studios at the other... and that's going to really destroy mid-range, high quality, innovative content.

I agree - and I think there are some wonderful things going on in games now - largely on the indie side of the spectrum. But like any part of the entertainment industry... content developers are really struggling. I think people see some successes - like Braid or World of Goo - and think "aha! the rise of the indie has come!" - and from some standpoint, yes - it certianly has. And those are great games, deserving of their success. But they mask a bigger story, which has been the slow destruction of the midsized independent development studio. If you are a animator, coder, or designer thats not interested in being a small indie entrepreneur, but don't want to be cog #2547 at the EA FPS Franchise Factory... you don't have a lot of options these days, and very little job security.

Best advice I can give: Go to a solid 4 year school, major in Comp Sci. Take every graphics and AI class they have, and make sure you understand your math really well. Even if you want to be a designer, I suggest this route. Programmers are the power-players in this industry - they are the ones who actually get shit done, and they hold all the cards. You want to have that power to just MAKE what you want to make - even if your end goal is designer or producer. Don't go to a special game dev program - it's unnecessary, and the better professors in programming are at the big 4 year schools.

Once you have your degree... you can do one of 2 things:

1) Go get a job as a coder. It's good experience, and you'll get paid to learn how to make games, which does not suck.

2) Make a game. Hell, you can start while you're in school. Pick up Unity and build some stuff. Nobody is stopping you. You don't even have to make a GOOD game - just make a few small games, and learn your craft. Sooner or later, you'll not suck. And then you're a game developer.