Womenize! – Inspiring Stories is our weekly series featuring inspirational individuals from games and tech. For this edition we talked to Emese-Anna Hoppa, Game Designer at Ubisoft Mainz. She speaks about how her career in game design evolved from an initial focus on art, with her university experiences ultimately leading her to discover and pursue a passion for game design. Read more about Anna here:
Hi Anna! Your career path in game design seems impressively linear, with each step seemingly building seamlessly on the last. How did your experiences during your education at Mediadesign University of Applied Sciences shape your career trajectory, and what pivotal moments or decisions during this time influenced your professional path the most?

Initially I was surprised to see my career being described as linear, but just by looking at my work experience, it really is! Although getting to this point was anything but that.

When I started university I didn’t know what area in game development I wanted to work in. In fact, I didn’t even know I wanted to work in games until I applied to university, since I never considered it a possible career. Initially, I wanted to become an artist working on comics and illustrations. And since I come from an Art and Graphics background, it was natural that I focused on Graphics Design and 2D Art at first during my studies. 
Very soon the studies briefly reignited my long-forgotten interest in Programming, but over time I naturally moved back to more graphical work and I put a lot of time into creating VFX and materials. Aside from that I also was focused on tasks my more specialized teammates didn’t have time for, so I also did camera work and sound editing here and there, helped with asset creation, graphic design and did some very light code work (mostly blueprinting in unreal).
At this point I actually didn’t have game design in my periphery at all.

In one of my student projects we didn’t have a dedicated game designer, since we all wanted to decide on the game’s direction and rules. At that time I picked up some tasks that were more design adjacent. Working more with the game’s rules and structure made me realize that I have a lot of fun with these topics and that I want to try my hand at it properly. 
So after the project concluded I threw myself into the subject of game design and tried to learn as much as possible. We only had one year left before we had to do our mandatory internship and since now my focus was on game design I really wanted to get an internship as a designer. Thankfully, for the next student project I worked in a team that accepted my wish to do game design and I could focus on that a lot.
While working more intensely on designs I discovered that I enjoy the systemic part of game design so I started to look for internship positions in companies that worked on games with big systems, like strategy and management games.
I got really lucky and found a great place with Limbic Entertainment where I was allowed to grow as a designer, but also stay true to my scattered interest in game development and take on other areas in limits, like supporting the UI team.

University gave me space to explore what I want to be very dynamically. While we did have specializations, I never felt I fit into any of them and I am grateful I could explore all the different areas in game development until I found something that I felt fit perfectly. That being said, I can see myself still having fun with anything I tried during university.

Your extensive volunteer work, such as at devcom and Deutscher Entwicklerpreis, has been a notable part of your journey. How has volunteering contributed to your growth and opportunities in the gaming industry, and what advice would you give to aspiring game designers about the value of volunteer experiences?

Volunteering has been part of my university life from my very first semester on. I consider this very lucky and I am grateful to my friend who asked me to join.

At the beginning of my studies I was a lot more awkward around people and I had a hard time asserting myself or initiating conversations compared to now. As a game designer, I have to do all of these day to day.
By volunteering I threw myself into an environment that demanded me to communicate a lot and efficiently. During shifts as a volunteer there is a high chance you have to talk to a lot of people. You have to communicate efficiently and confidently and be flexible, since at events things can change very quickly and you have to be ready to drop everything and take on a new task. At first I had to push myself hard and was very nervous, but over time everything became a lot easier. And since I liked it so much, I kept returning to any event I could. I am sure people around me noticed since I got more and more responsibility, which in return never let me stay in my comfort zone for too long.
And all of this happened so naturally, I had to actively remember how I was at my very first event to notice.

But all of this couldn’t have happened without having a supportive team.

The best part about volunteering is easily the people you meet and work with. Especially in the beginning of one’s career it’s hard to network and get to know people. Someone with the same volunteer shirt as you is easier to approach. And with each event there are always new faces, but also a lot of returning people and over time you have your own small community. 

Volunteering is a great way to improve a lot of soft skills naturally that benefit greatly when working in teams. The community you are part of as a volunteer reaches outside of the events themself and you will always find someone you worked with at any industry gathering. When I needed to relocate for my internship, it was the volunteer community I turned to to ask for pointers on where to find a place to live. Meeting fellow volunteers instantly brings a smile to my face, even if I didn’t work with them closely. 🙂

Your work spans various roles from intern to full-time game designer at multiple companies. Can you share your approach to game design and how your methodology has evolved over the years, especially with the transition from student projects to professional game development?

As I talked about in the first question, I didn’t have a clear role in most projects and I didn’t see myself in the role of the game designer until late in my studies.

During the projects I worked on in the role of the game designer I developed a way for myself to deal with design problems which was approximately something like this:

At first I sat down to set myself goals. What does the feature want to be? What are the key aspects that need to be in the feature and what role does it fulfill in the whole game. When I first started designing I didn’t think about all of these questions, but over time I gained a better understanding of what to ask. The general idea, to figure out what to work towards, stayed the same.

After the goals have been set and understood, I would sit down and do some research for the features. Here I try to branch out and not only look at games. I like reading up online how the real world equivalent of my design worked and then go to other media and then lastly check out games.

The next step is to sort through the material and rough ideas that I gathered in the former phase and I start working on rough concepts. I try to write multiple concepts here to explore different directions. The writing is very rough and it’s not pretty, but that’s enough.

After all of this time sitting around alone with the design I need to talk to someone and I introduce my concepts to another person. At university it was whoever had time for me, at work it was my lead, my designer teammates or feature team. I find this step important to get a reality check and get a different perspective on the matter. There are times where you overlook something that’s glaringly obvious, but you couldn’t figure it out anymore by yourself because you stared at the problem for so long.

Only after these steps I settle on a concept and I start detailing it out, getting to the actual rules and constraints.
After this I get some more feedback and only then I start documenting my design. In this step I structure all of the information I created and try to make it as enjoyable to read as possible. My graphics and art background helps me greatly here, since I can make all sorts of edits and graphics to illustrate my more complex rules.

To summarize:

  1. Set Design Goals.
  2. Research.
  3. Develop multiple rough concepts.
  4. Introduce concepts to another person.
  5. Get Feedback and Adjust Design.
  6. Write Documentation.

It sounds very detailed, and I did follow this pretty rigidly, so everything I designed took a lot of time, since I wanted to get everything “100% right”.

This strict workflow is something I fall back to when I feel overwhelmed, since it’s a good step by step guide to get to a finished design. Since I started gaining experience I find myself getting more relaxed in which order I take these steps and I acquired a good feeling when I can skip some of them, for example starting with concepting and looping back to research when needed.

The one step that I don’t skip is the one where I am setting or aligning myself with design goals. It is the part of the workflow where you find out what you work towards and if that’s not clear, you can’t make decisions in any other steps of the process.

Thanks for this interview, Anna!

Anna’s links: LinkedIn

Womenize! – Inspiring Stories Feature by Madeleine Egger