A Day In the Life of a McDesigner (April 2014)

Hi everyone! As usual, it has been a while since I've posted. Many things have kept me away from blogging. The biggest thing has been the birth of my adorable baby boy, James Gerard McCann! He's nearly six months old and is completely adorable... which I can safely say now that he's sleeping and not crying.

A while back on twitter, I asked people what they wanted to hear from me as a game designer. One of the things that came up is, what exactly do you do  during the day? This has come up a lot in interviews that either I've done or that other people have done, so I figured it would be interesting to  post a blog about a random day in my life at work for people to read. There will be a lot of these, as days tend to be varied.

So, without further ado, here is an outline of a day in the life of a McDesigner. This one comes from a long time ago, before my son was born, around April 2014. Keep in mind that since I'm pulling this from a while back, this may be less "a day of" and more of, "Sean mashed together several memories and is calling it a day."

The main goal of the day was to pitch the episode, Capture the Flag, for Star Trek Online's Delta Rising expansion. In the morning before the meeting, I was going over the pitch idea with the environment artist, Adam Flores, who would be working with me on it.

A few days before this, I was given the times that I would get for support from environment (Adam) and also how long I would be given to work on the episode.  I was given the general outline of what story points had to happen in the quest and asked to fill in the blanks.  As a little, "bonus quest", our producers asked if I could shave the environment time down to give Adam extra time to support an episode that was already going to be big.As another side quest, the mission involved a "Super" version of a bad guy, and I was asked to replicate and improve upon a cool fight cutscene I did in the previous release.

This was an episode that was going to be tricky, as my wife was ready to give birth at any moment, so there was no guarantee that I would finish it. So, that morning, I finished making a very clear documentation which included drawn maps, of what the mission would look like. I had to make sure that someone who wasn't me could theoretically come in and pick up wherever I left off.

During the process, I had worked together with Adam to figure out how to use his time. Together, we came up with a proposal for the environment that would take significantly less time, but would still give us a great result and allow him more time to work on the other task. The work he would do would be to do big, sweeping material swaps on areas to make things feel different, along with lighting and propping the areas with pre-existing assets. Anyone familiar with the episode knows that we took a pre-existing interior kit and put different materials on it to look new.

Before the meeting, Adam and I double checked the document written to make sure we were on the same page. The meeting itself had the leads from the various disicplines that would be involved, along with the producer in charge of the episodes as a whole. I had the doc up on a projector describing what I wanted to do with the episode and outlined what each part of the mission would be. For the most part, the meeting went well. The leads and producers had some feedback regarding what could be potentially risky for the mission, such as the big fight scene and a boss fight I wanted to do, and I agreed to get the risky things done first in the event that I had to take Paternity leave. We set a deadline of three days until our first whitebox playable, where the leads and I sit down and run through a very basic version of the mission to see how it feels from a very high level.

Once the meeting was over, the rest of my day was spent whiteboxing the mission. This means that I went through and took existing assets to piece together the mission map and set up the flow of the ground portion of the mission from room to room; what encounters would be in this room, how the player would go from level to level, etc. Since I had written up a clear doc with a map, all I had to do was follow what I already planned out.

I also set up a mission design outline in the game, things like titles for mission objectives, how they would flow into one another. During this time, Adam was finishing up his previous tasks, this way I would be a day or two ahead of him to get everything orderly before he came in to art it up.

By the end of the day, the whitebox of the mission was complete. The task itself was pretty easy since everything was concrete and agreed upon by the higher ups. Adam had a good idea of what the art should be, and had looked over everything I set up and gave it the thumb's up that everything could be accomplished by him in 5 days time.

With that finished, I left the studio and figured out what I would do the next day - set up the scripting for the cool fight scene people wanted, and then actually set up the framing and shots for the cutscene, then finally put it all together and tweak everything to work. Long story short, my next day was going to be totally different from my previous day, which tends to be the norm in this line of work.

And that was a day in the life of a McDesigner. I hope this was only slightly boring, mostly interesting, and maybe a little exciting. Please feel free to leave feedback about what you all thought of this post, and I'll do my best to keep posting these more often!