21 hours ago, Tom Sloper said:

Then get an MBA after you've finished your design degree. If you want to call the shots, you have to be the head of the company. Business, business, business. 

What about lead designers? Do they have MBAs too?

I've read all three links that Tom Sloper posted. 

I was aware that I'm not going to work on my ideas and initially I won't even get to have a say in major characters. Thankfully, I think I have something to add at every level, weather I'm only designing a room and an encounter, a few spells and items or if I get to have major impact on the overall game play.  I've understood for a while now that I won't have a major impact on the creative aspect of the game I'm working on in the first half of my career (unless I happen to be even better than I think I could be).

Having read what you all said about what a designer actually does...while it's not as exciting as I fantasised about it when I was 18, it's no particular surprise at this point. The actual writing part sounds easy, the hard part is no doubt to communicate your ideas with others and convince them that you know what the hell you are talking about (see the bit where he talks about being second guessed from both bottom and up).

Just to clarify: If I was a junior designer at From Soft for example, I wouldn't get to design bosses or major NPCs, but I might get to chip in with designing a level and placing the enemies and traps, MAYBE design a few bad guys/weapons/spells of my own. Am I getting it right? I would also need to do a lot of paperwork and writing, although I still don't fully understand how can I be writing so much that it takes up 5-6 hours a day. How long can it take to write about my limited contributions? 

My ultimate dream is to ascend through the ranks to the point where I have a name for myself, then either get one  of the top positions or found a small company of my own with a team of something like 5-20 depending on how much money I can scrape together. I imagine I could get to do this by my late 40s, 50s if everything goes well. The latter sounds more appealing to my current young self, but by the time I get there I might have different priorities.

So let's say I finish this course. This is a level 5 college degree in the UK, I have somewhat of a portfolio...then what? Get into Q.A. or start a uni degree? What, if anything, I should be doing on the side that my degrees won't cover?

To be clear, I'm willing to move all over the world.

I also know that this is an immensely competitive profession and that I have to work a lot. I also know that I don't *really* know just how competitive and how much work exactly, but that's part of the fun, right?

If you look at my list of activities earlier in the thread, you'll see plenty of things that you could be doing that would fill an 8 hour working day. You certainly wouldn't be spending most (or any) of the day writing about things you already did. You'd be writing documents to specify what is going to happen, or at least what you would like to happen (before the programmers, artists, producers, and everyone else read the document and negotiate with you on the contents). It is entirely about communication - ensuring that your document is adequate for programmers and artists to work from.

But you'd also spend a lot of time, at least once proper development starts, actually putting things into the engine. That's where learning the tools comes in.

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This is a level 5 college degree in the UK, I have somewhat of a portfolio...then what?

I would recommend applying for game design jobs. I also recommend you start looking NOW at what they ask for in those jobs, so that you can spend the next year ensuring that your college work counts towards that, where possible, and where it's not possible, you can do work in your spare time to fill the gaps. You don't need to ask us what you need to be learning - the job descriptions tell you, right from the horses' mouths. Even senior designer job ads are useful to look at because while you can't be expected to have everything on that list, you can be confident that anything on there is relevant to you, and is therefore something to pursue.

I don't recommend even thinking about Q.A. It's a bit of an old cliché for people to say that you get into games by starting at Q.A. and working your way up, but while that is definitely a route for some people, it's not as common today for several reasons - Q.A. teams are smaller than before, Q.A. teams are often off-site and/or outsourced, there are people training specifically in design who might have more relevant skills than Q.A. workers and who are thus more likely to get hired than you, etc. Besides which, Q.A. is an important role in its own right with its own set of skills, and isn't just something that a designer-in-waiting can do automatically.