Soft Skills for Game Developers:
What Do You Need to Develop a Video Game?
See also: Conflict Resolution
Successfully developing a game requires more than your knowledge of coding and numbers. That’s unless you want to do everything alone. If you plan to work with people, you will need to interact with them. You will often need to settle conflicts, pitch ideas, mediate discussions, etc. to real and actual people.
Therefore, you need soft skills to be a game developer.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are attributes or traits that will help you interact with people and accomplish your goals as a game developer. Although there are quite a number of them, we have compiled a list of five essential soft skills that you will need to develop a video game. But is that all you need?
Choose the right server hosting
A dedicated server is a computer that will allow you to host games for users. It facilitates a fast, stable, and reliable connection to your game. It also offers more storage, memory, and processing capabilities so people can enjoy your game, provided you meet the server host requirements. For example, space engineers best server host provides extreme scalability for flexible use. Choosing the right server hosting comes down to speed, support, and security. You need to be able to scale your website as your audience grows to handle a surge in traffic.
To get the best out of video games development:
Decide how much hand-holding you’ll need.
Estimate the amount of traffic you expect
Understand the various server types
Choose a reasonably priced offer
Communication skills
Communication skills are vital to a game developer. You will need to communicate with clients, colleagues, vendors, etc. at different stages of the game development. Whether in-person or not, you must speak clearly and politely without downplaying your message.
Communication is not only about speaking. You must also be a good listener, since all of the people mentioned above will also need to communicate their ideas. The common channels you need to develop include:
Oral communication: this is the process of conveying your ideas and information through spoken languages.
Written communication: the use of written languages to communicate information.
Visual communication: conveying information through wordless cues and the use of imagery.
Contextual communication: passing information in various contexts, including ideas relating to persons, situations, behaviors, etc.
Active listening: the process of restating or summarizing what you hear to confirm that you understand all parties and avoid misunderstandings.
You will find practical use of communication skills as a developer for persuasion, public speaking, writing reports and proposals, negotiation, etc.
Critical-thinking skills
Another skill you need to master as a game developer is critical thinking skills. You must be able to process and analyze mass information, situations, and issues objectively. In other words, your decision should focus on facts without the influence of opinions, biases, and personal feelings.
Critical thinking allows you to make informed and logical decisions. The critical thinking skills you need as a developer include:
Identification: every service is a solution to a problem. However, it starts with an identification of the problem or factors that influence it. Therefore, you must be able to identify problems so that you can dig deeper for potential solutions.
Research: after identifying the problem, you will research underlying issues, compare them to facts and figures, and independently verify the information.
Inference: this is the ability to draw conclusions from any information presented to you.
Curiosity: a curious mind won’t take every piece of information at face value. Productive curiosity will ask questions about things and find alternative approaches to problems.
Interpersonal skills
These are the skills you need for everyday interaction with people. Since most of what you’ll do requires interaction with others, you must be good at getting along with them if you want to be successful as a game developer.
The popular interpersonal skills you’ll need as a developer include:
Conflict management: this includes mediating, counseling, constructive criticism, conflict resolution, and problem-solving skills.
Empathy: this is the ability to understand others and what they are passing through. To excel at this, you must demonstrate care, compassion, patience, kindness, diplomacy, respect, and sensitivity.
Teamwork: even if you are an independent developer, you will still need to collaborate with others. Therefore, you must develop yourself in areas of team building, teamwork, and collaboration.
Leadership skills
To lead effectively, you must become a great leader. However, the learning process is not that simple. There is no simple way to describe leadership skills. However, these skills revolve around the ability to lead a project, deliver it, build a sense of purpose among teammates, and empower others to do the same. In other words, your leadership skills will help you inspire employees to achieve business goals.
Like others, we have mentioned, you can learn leadership skills. The following are areas you should focus on:
People management: finding the right people and motivating them towards your vision.
Planning and delivery: creating a blueprint of the desired ends and solving challenges along the way.
Persuasion and influence: the process of encouraging others to achieve your vision by demonstrating its advantages.
Numerical skills
Now, this is the skill that most developers are familiar with. Numerical skill is the ability to work with numbers using various mathematical formulas. To be successful as a developer, you must be able to compile and compare statistical data in various formats, interpret the data, and communicate the result. You can find more soft skills you need and their practical application as a game developer online.
Conclusion
If you noticed, you would discover that many of these skills overlap in their functionality. This is an indication that you can’t have one without the other. In other words, you can’t build numerical skills and neglect critical thinking skills. What do you do when you encounter a problem? Thankfully, you can learn and master these skills with commitment and diligence.
About the Author
Rebecca J. Robinson is a freelance writer. She is passionate about writing and describing online games, games development and design and has worked with incredibly talented people across different companies.