#technical designer

It's funny you ask because my current role is Technical Designer. Over the course of my career, I've swung back and forth across the line between engineering and game design like a pendulum, sometimes leaning more heavily on my technical skills and others depending on my design skills. That likely affects my opinion on the role.

I think that Tech Designers are very helpful as an intermediary in large teams when there's a lot of game system content to be built, but also very helpful to have on a very small team because of the breadth of expertise we can bring across multiple disciplines. We're least useful in the mid-sized teams where there aren't enough other designers to support and the tech designer's role is often better replaced with a full-on gameplay engineer who can handle C++ tasks as well.

I think that a good Tech Designer is a utility player and, as such, should be able to do both develop tool support for other designers and handle challenging technical implementations. For more junior tech designers, I suggest focusing on a single specialization to start with and to try to find both a design mentor and a technical mentor. That way you can grow in both disciplines and integrate the things you learn into your overall style as you go.

When it comes to layoffs, tech designers are a bit harder to replace than normal designers but not as difficult to replace as engineers. They aren't special unicorns like technical artists, but very few roles in the industry are. The more experienced the tech designer, the easier it is to find new work - especially if you have stronger technical skills.

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Technical artists are worth their weight in gold and in super duper high demand. If you have the skills to be a technical artist (i.e. knowledge about shaders, pipelines, and/or art asset performance), studios will beat a path to your door to hire you. Technical designers as a specific role are less in demand, since you generally need enough other designers to support, or you’re on a tiny team where you have to wear all the hats at once. There isn’t really a codified role for an art designer (or whatever we’d call it). There are some roles with a decent amount of crossover like level design with environment art or UX design with UI art, but such specific roles are less common and often more of a natural evolution of specific developers with desires in a specific direction that carve out that sort of role for themselves more than anything else.

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Technical skills can be very valuable for specific design roles, but not for all design roles. For example, programming skill isn’t super useful to a level designer. Understanding of interior design principles, like creating space and how object placement and sight lines affect the viewer’s feelings, is far more valuable to a level designer than programming ability. However, the engineering background can be extremely valuable to other design varieties - engineering math, for example, is very useful to systems designers who spend a lot of time working with formulas for things like power growth curves.

The best fit for someone like you is probably the true Technical Designer role. A technical designer often writes scripts and tools for other designers to enable them to create content, a designer for designers. There’s a good amount of overlap with gameplay programming in this regard, but the technical designer usually spends more time working with designers (e.g. adding support for a new type of effect condition to the effect editor tool) while the gameplay programmer is sometimes tasked with other work that isn’t as design-facing, like building a system to handle switching between PVP and PVE for a game server or inserting the playing of visual effects under specific circumstances in the rendering pipeline.

Unfortunately, not every studio has the need for a technical designer compared to level, systems, narrative, etc. designers. Technical design roles also aren’t usually offered at the junior level. A technical designer role tends to be created when a large design team needs enough dedicated support to justify the cost. Technical designers are usually compensated at about the same level as gameplay programmers (or maybe a little less, if the employer has a codified separate design track advancement structure). Other types of designers that occasionally use technical skills (like systems designers) are usually paid less than technical designers or programmers.

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FOLLOWING HIS KEEN UNDERSTANDING OF BOTH PROGRAMMING AND DESIGN, JAYCE FOUND HIS WAY TO GUERRILLA AS TECHNICAL DESIGNER TO HELP TEAMS IMPLEMENT THEIR VISION.

Jayce shares his knowledge of technical design, the process for helping several game teams, and shares tips for those interested in pursuing this unique discipline!

Hi Jayce! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today. Before we get into everything technical design, tell us about yourself!

Hello! I was born and raised here in Amsterdam, but have been living in Zaandam since 2016. I studied Gaming Art at Media College Amsterdam and Game Design and Development at Utrecht School of the Arts, where I focused on flash development using Flash, Unity and Unreal Engine 4. Before I came to Guerrilla, I was at Turtleneck Studios and Little Chicken Game Company and Media.Monks.

Outside of schooling and work, I love sim racing, (aggressive) inline skating, bowling, going out for ramen and Korean BBQ, building model kits like gunpla – and I used to dance!

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So technical design requires a lot of foresight, but also the freedom to think through various situations? Is there a part in Horizon Forbidden West particularly where we can see the impact of your work?

You may not be able to see my work visually in-game, but I help with many things behind the scenes. Here are two scenarios in Horizon Forbidden West where I helped:

If the player starts three main quests at the same time and they must complete all three that can be completed in any order before they continue with the next main quest – specifically: The Broken Sky, The Sea of Sands, and Seeds of the Past. At some point in the game, the player talks to GAIA and can choose the route they want to do first to acquire an AI kernel. This wasn’t something Guerrilla had implemented before, so it was quite unique to set up this scenario.

Technical Designer Dubai UAE

Position: Technical Designer Date posted: 2021-05-03 Industry: Joinery & Fitout Employment type: Temporary Experience: 3 to 5 year Qualification: Bachelor’s Degree holder Salary: AED 5000 to 10000 Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates Company: Confidential Description: Technical Designer – Joinery & Fitout Designing of personalized furniture and detailed drawing using #AutoCAD. AutoCAD…

Technical Joinery Designer, Berkshire, £Negotiable, V03765

This manufacturer creates joinery pieces for some of the finest and advanced commercial interiors being designed in the UK today. Operating nationwide from their factory and offices just outside London, they offer total management of joinery packages, from initial site survey through to installation. They are currently seeking an experienced Technical Designer to work with their progressive team of designers and makers.

You’ll be creating concept designs, rendering in KeyShot and turning them into ready-to-manufacture technical drawings for the in-house joinery workshop. You’ll also be producing complete and checked technical drawings using Solid Edge 3D design software (Fluency in SolidWorks will be considered).

Accuracy in take offs for CNC milling and other outsourced material production will be required, directly from the CAD drawings. You’ll be connecting with joiners to discuss and get feedback on the practicality of joinery items designed, so hands-on experience from the joinery sector is needed and hands-on knowledge of manufacturing and assembling would be desirable. A genuine interest in the marketplace and a willingness to take part in interdepartmental discussions alongside good communication and interpersonal skills is also sought.