Damion Schubert: The Senior Designer Mindset

As you might know, we’re big fans of Damion Schubert.

He is of course the Princple Lead Systems Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic, and happens to have more than a decade of game design and development experience under his belt. Given all of that, he pens a great regular column in Game Developer Magazine entitled Design Of The Times that we like to cover, even though it’s not usually directly related to TOR.

This time around, his column subject is “The Senior Designer Mindset.” Damion discusses things that designers can focus on to improve their contributions with an eye on moving up into a Senior Designer role.

Under his first bullet, Damion discusses how important “finishing” is to the design process, and in particular how long that has been going on with Star Wars: The Old Republic:

We’ve actually been in finishing mode for months, long before our release date was public. Part of what allows heavyweights like BioWare, Blizzard and Valve to release such great games is their focus on ensuring they’re proud to put their brand on their end products.

Unfortunately the full text isn’t available online without a subscription, but well worth a read if you’re interested in taking a peek behind the curtain of the creation of video games.

You can subscribe to Game Developer Magazine or buy each monthly issue digitally here, or check your local newsstand or bookstore for a copy.

Game Developer - November 2011