The talk by Larian Studios was very interesting as they spoke about the whole process they go through when developing a game.

The way they described the different roles made them easy to understand and reframed them in a fantasy like way; describing RPG design as ‘story tellers’ and UI/UX design as ‘a window to worlds’.
This way of rewording them prompted me to think about these jobs differently and if they were something that interested me.

They broke down the types of research they did and where they did it for the development of Buldurs Gate:

• Source Material – Players Handbook
• Community research – YouTubers (XP to Level 3)
• Websites – RPG bot, Reddit etc…

During ideation they used a mixture of google docs/word, spreadsheets, miro/visio and photoshop to create design goals and pillars, internal design review and iteration. This was interesting to me as they are all applications I have used before.

They showed how different departments were connected and related making it easy to understand how much collaboration goes into making a game. While I had previous experience working with some of the game design students in year 2, there was significantly less communication between us.

This presentation helped to show how different the experience is in a professional setting and what to keep in mind before moving into the industry.