The games we love to play are designed and developed by designers. Meet one — Santhosh Kumar Subramanian.
These developers design Tabletop, Digital/Mobile to TV show based games. Sanotosh, however, predominantly designs and develops tabletop games and a few digital or TV based games. He works with corporates and educational institutions and designs games based on their requirements. “I create a fully tested prototype, after content research, play testing, illustration and production.”
Most developers work on more than one game at the same time and so their days are quite haphazard and crazy. “I begin the day with client meetings and then start working on game — conceptualisation and content research. I usually switch off every gadget and work with pen and paper. Post lunch, I work with illustrators to convert the paper prototypes to illustrated ones. The rest of the day is spent setting the game mechanics and story boarding.”
Play it to win it
For a career in designing, “you must be passionate and creative...not necessarily in making a game. Also, you must be able to pay attention to detail. As they say, the devil is in the detail,” says Santhosh.
Santhosh is involved with child development. “I run Bambaram, in Chennai, a toys and games library for kids, so children can rent educational toys and games for play. I also run workshops called “The Elf Skool” in schools. I teach children how to design their own board/card games from scratch. At the end of the workshop, the children have a completely illustrated game they have designed. We are collaborating with game manufacturers to get the games branded.”
As it is a vibrant industry, developers have to keep themselves updated. Attending game fairs and getting games reviewed on Youtube and game forums like Boardgamegeeks is helpful.
Game developers can choose from a variety of fields like school education, training and development in the corporate world, business simulation, leisure play, and gamification in industrial processes and so on.
What made Santhosh choose this as his career?
“I am a creative person and I enjoy the process of making something from an empty canvas.
It took me almost 10 years to figure out that I like to design games. I started it as an experiment, I stuck to it!” he says
