Design == Communication

The role of a designer is somewhat fuzzy to define. Truth is, they do lots of stuff that are not always related to each other. From scripting to script-writing and from difficulty curves to HUD design, the designer touches many areas (thou by no means masters any of them completely). What this does is that we have a wide array of "types" of designers. Even if its not a formal position, every designer knows what he is good at and what he enjoys doing most. For example, I've always considered myself first and foremost a system designer (which means I'm good at game mechanics) with story design coming in on a close second. Level design and usability design.....well let's just say I'm working on improving them :)

One would think that this means that different types of designers need different skills, and its true. A hard math base is not as useful for script writing as it is for scripting. However there is one skill that is absolutely essential for any designer. They need to be a good communicator. And I'm not just talking about communicating with the player; this is a given. That's the whole point of designing games in the first place. I'm talking about communicating with your team. As mentioned above, the game designer can't be a specialist in all areas; hence he has to be able to get the whole team to truly understand a project and how what they're doing fits in the big picture.

Failure in this is terrible for moral, as the team stops feeling ownership over the project once they see their work being scrapped due to a misunderstanding. This is the designer's fault, and as such, he has to take responsibility to fix it. Word of advice, make your meetings as clear, as dynamic and as engaging as possible. At first, my meeting with the team consisted of handing out lists of the assets/mechanics/what ever, and together going through them. This (in theory) allowed them to spot troublesome parts right away. However in practice, they lost attention half way through, and found it hard to remember what was said (or even if the meeting took place!). Bad communication. Now what I do is create a simple, graphic, animated PowerPoint presentation that explains the general ideas. It sill analyzes everything one by one, but because they can see it in "action" its easier for them to understand it and remember it. Of course, its more work on my part to create a slide presentation, but its definitely worth it.