Spelling It Out: The Communication Roles of a Game Designer
Speaker:
Nathan Sumsion
20 Apr 2011
7:00 PM
Great Hall, Memorial Union
Nathan Sumsion is a senior game designer at Avalanche-Disney Interactive Studios. Most recently, he was senior designer on Toy Story 3 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii, released in summer 2010, and on Meet the Robinsons for PlayStation 2, GameCube, Wii and Xbox 360, released in spring 2007. He also taught Game Design Process and Visual Interface Design in the game design program at ITT Tech in Salt Lake City. Sumsion will be the primary judge for the ISU Game Development Competition, funded by a Motorola Foundation grant. The teams will display their work in the Great Hall throughout the day, with the awards announced following Mr. Sumsion's lecture.
Communicating your design ideas is fundamentally one of the most important roles of the game designer. Not only do you have to communicate the design of a game to a publisher and their marketing teams, but you have to communicate the design to the development team creating the game and communicate the rules to the player who is trying to play it. Sumsion will talk about the different needs of each group and finding effective ways to address those needs to successfully design, develop, market, sell and play video games.
For more information on the Iowa State University Game Development Competition, [url=http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~cjohnson/gamecomp/index.php]click here[/url].