I want...

I want to be an ideas man. Among other things I'd like to do as an adult, one of them is do design strategy games. I don't want to do the coding or all the boring technical stuff, I just want to be the guy that says, early tanks should be slow and should break down often, guys on horses should be able to fall from their horses, get up and keep fighting, this type of starship should be able to warp out when it gets into a jam. I'd like to design the stories, the universes, direct the voice actors. I think that'd be a lot of fun.

Could I?

Sure you can. And you are! - (you didn't mention anything about being paid to do that.)

You just did it. All you have to do is keep writting about what you think should be done and in no time they will steal everything of yours and claim they had the ideas first!

Well, I meant, get paid for it...

Yes you will if you do more...have more to offer than just nifty ideas. You see many, MANY cool ideas are left out of games because designers know the limits of the system the game is being designed or being ported to. Incredible ideas are left out because it costs time and money and a designer with knowledge of what he/she is doing will know what is feasible or not.

You only seem to have cool ideas...nothing else so, yes...you will have to partake in some of the boring stuff.

The "boring technical stuff" includes the design a lot of the times too.

CuriousGene said:

The "boring technical stuff" includes the design a lot of the times too.

Click to expand...

Si, the artist must know 3d rendering programs, suffcient knowledge of programming so you don't bug the programming department 24/7 and not to mention Drawing. There is no particular guy in the team just throwing out ideas (Unless the game is being adapted from your book or you are an expert of some field and needed for your wealth of knowledge or a hired script writer.)

Unless you are the director...but those guys work their up the ladder from menial jobs.

I'd imagine it's a mixture of Cost, Time and Laziness.

For absolutely everything to be put into a game so you have the highest amount of detail, you would have to consider that all those small details have to be put together in a games development plan. Such plans are used so that multiple people can work towards the completion of the same program, and they are also helpful in the sense that plans can be made generic and then applied to any programming language.

Also some of those "extras" are fiddley and therefore some designers would stay clear.

Another aspect is the time it would take to place those extras into the plan, and debug them during programming. Most of the mainstream games have a development Gant chart rigged that will have a specified development time. All those graphical extra's could potentially push the development time period up, the longer the time period, the more out of touch with the current software and hardware development the game becomes.

Lastly is cost, all that extra coding is costly if it's not applied to the cost at the very beginning of the development stages.

However it is possible that such pieces can be worked on with the generation of programs version numbers, thats why in some games a patch might add graphics or objects into a program, because those extras were placed into the Retro-Development Queue which is near the end of a Systems Life Cycle.

OR...you could start by making a strategy boardgame. If it becomes a hit you shouldn't have a problem getting a company like EA, Blizzard, etc to make it a video game for you and pay you for it!

Start a company and hire people to do the boring stuff that you tell them to do.
Easy.