Hi there
I am a technical designer working in China, I would like to share some of my experience with you.
Technical designers are somewhat rare in the industry (in China), they are people who can combine the mind set of game designer and programmer. Usualy, they are not ones who would create the actual gameplay, but they will make sure designers are equipped with right tool and knowledge to create gameplay *productively*.
A technical designer’s job routine is like:
1. understand what gameplay your fellow designers what to build.
2. translate your understanding into technical request and pass to programmers (or find third party solution, which is common in unity)
3. teach your fellow designers how to utilize solution.
4. build a workflow, eliminate any task that ask designers work repetitively or task that easy to create human error. You can achieve this by introducing automation in the tools. A similar comparison is technical artist.
You need to be the know how person your designers come to when they have some ideas but do not know how to build them, or they do not know how much work is actually involved. You are the first line of defense of wasted man power on un-matured design ideas.
A technical designer does not need to be a proficient programmer, but you do need to be a good game designer with some coding experience. You also need to have lots of hands on knowledge of different tools that can help your designers to work more productively.
There are lots of burden on the shoulder of technical designer, but it is also a very achieving position, you will be constantly solving problems, looking for solutions and creating possibilities.
It is a long road to become a really good technical designer, but in the end it pays off, a lot.
Now, as for Playmaker, I can tell you that Playmaker is a huge time saver for me and our programmers.
We are using Playmaker in multiple areas in current project, UI, Cameras, Audio, FX, Animator…etc.
The very first advantage of using Playmaker is how fast it can make prototypes to test ideas before take ideas to programmers. You can actually use Playmaker to build fake state machines that only have flow and states but without actually functions, in this way you can review the design process with designers.
The second advantage of Playmaker is its powerful event system. Make good use of them allow your state machine easily talk to each other and receive message from other component in Unity.
The third advantage in my opinion, should be the template system. Work enough time with playmaker make you realize how easy they become larger and messier as the complexity of your game grows. Then you will need to identify which parts of your state machines can be reused, shared, and modularized. Save these state machines as templates, expose their variables. Then you would either hook them on game objects or use them as sub FSMs. Using template is very important when you want to improve productivity.
The real important thing is, I think, that unity and unreal are game engines that emphasizes the ideas of community and releasing the creative power of non coding people. If you want to do some functionality in the game, you should always check if someone already come up with solutions that better than your own coding. Playmaker is one of such tools for unity, non coder can use it to utilize vast functionality of unity in fast, accessible way. And in the hand of open minded programmer, playmaker will be even more productive. Not to mention the community behind Playmaker and other good plugins already provided playmaker support.
But keep in mind Playmaker is one of the plugins on the asset store that is in the “excellent” category , there are other wonders out there, too.
Thanks for the reading and forgive my English!
