How to get lead designers?

[wheat heart]

Is there any solid, reliable way to get skilled, creative lead designers? Trying by hiring and nothing of quality so far.

[mild sierra]

In my experience, the best reliable way to get skilled designers is to take them off other AI companies. Although I may be incorrect.

[wild mirage]

i tend to hire low salary designers and put them on contracts as lead designer to get their creativity score... their field of skill can be trained later, creativity is the bit you want to know... once they done enough contracts and got their creativity nice and high at the age of 23, you can then get them to lead dev and release some software, 2 in each field will get their xp up to maximum for that field

then you have yourself a lead dev that'll be with you for 40 years

if you double up that with the need for a company CEO, you can even trick them to not want any of the usual lead dev demands... a CEO doesn't want anything

[deft stag]

To reliably secure skilled, creative lead designers, headhunting or acquiring a company are effective methods
Another, less certain approach is to hire a large number of low-wage designers and iterate through contracts until you find one with the desired creativity (e.g., 95 or higher)
Keep in mind that the range of masked creativity data narrows as it balances toward the actual value
This means a designer whose upper limit suddenly drops likely has low actual creativity, allowing you to terminate them immediately without waiting for the value to finalize
To prepare for potential lawsuits from mass terminations, it’s advisable to maximize severance packages or have a legal team ready

[wheat heart]

just a followup question, Do you need at least 95% creativity to produce high-quality inspiring product? I got 90% creativity on my first attempt, and now I’m wondering if that’s actually good.

[wild mirage]

no, 85% creativity lead designers will pop out visionary products once they're fully experienced in a specific area

i don't know how low the lead designer's creativity can go to keep visionary products, but 85% lead designer creativity doing visionary products is what i have experience with myself

for a lead designer to be a visionary themselves would require 95% creativity on their part

a nearly impossible task

[wheat adder]

In my game I have a poach option in other companies tab, but it always just says "Try again in 1 month" despite having never used it.

[deft stag]

As LadyHawk mentioned, for a product to be considered visionary, the lead designer's creativity can be somewhat less stringent
That said, I believe that even among visionary products, they are internally scored, and the higher the score, the better
Since finding a lead designer with Creativity below 95 isn't too difficult, if you're going to the trouble of scouting from new designers, you'd want to aim for someone exceeding 95

[deft stag]

Perhaps that lead designer has a binding contract with the company
Take a look at other companies as well

[wheat adder]

To be fair as every company says this I thought it was some old workshop item that broke. I have some stuff I installed years ago but I remember they were only a few furniture. (the button itself I thought was a mod)

So they need to have a non-binding contract like how they ask you sometimes?

[deft stag]

Also, you can also recruit a lead designer from "Look for Applicants," but most designers found there tend to lack high Creativity, and even if they have it, they often come with many demands.

[wheat adder]

I did not notice this function. Vanilla game?

I feel like it would still be worth a look despite the extra requests

[wheat heart]

I'm training my new lead designers, but for some reason, the progress has been stuck at 80% and hasn't improved over the last three design iterations. Any idea why? The person seems to be working just fine.

[wild mirage]

click details, check the very bottom to see if you're missing skills to finish it

[deft stag]

The lead designer can only inject creativity points during the first iteration. In typical software development, you’d wait for the lead designer before moving to the next iteration, but it seems your software is a contracted construct, right? With contracts, the design phase progresses without waiting for the lead designer, so tasks often move forward while they’re, say, on lunch break. Honestly, the lead designer’s role in a contract is just to showcase their creativity, so it’s not a big deal.