a.k.a. What is a game designer anyway? And how do I become one?
This has sat in my drafts folder for more than 6 months, so I’m going to just post it now, despite its incompleteness (sheesh. The whole point of starting a blog was so that I could post half-written articles and not sit on them for months at a time. Doh).
(also, I’d actually forgotten this wasn’t published yet. I only realised when reading Scott’s first “How to break into the games industry” hack)
Designer Career Chart
Designer -> Lead Designer -> Creative Director -> Development Director
[it almost never ever works out that way. Unless you’re more interested in management than game design, in which case I’d question your suitability to become a game designer. Don’t worry, courtesy of the wonderful people over at TCE, I’ve got a much more accurate and informative explanation of this coming. In another post. When I get A Round Tuit]
Designer Levels
Designer
You design things. See below for elaboration on the various kinds in e.g. MMO game development…
Typically you only design one small area of the game – a sub-system, a particular level, etc.
Senior Designer
[Don’t ask me. I was going to fill this bit in later with something you DON’T know, something new and interesting, when I’d got a coherent explanation from some better people than me.]
Basically … you take responsibility for a general area that includes various subsystems, or you take responsibility for all levels, etc. You typically are responsible for ensuring some consistency of style and balance across those areas (some of which you’ve probably farmed out to other designers).
Lead Designer
[Don’t ask me. I was going to fill this bit in later with something you DON’T know, something new and interesting, when I’d got a coherent explanation from some better people than me.]
Um. Makes the Lead Programmer’s life miserable? :) Pretend I didn’t say that. IMHO and IME, the Lead Artist/Programmer/Designer are probably more similar to each other than to any other role – they take overall responsibility for their teams, they catch things that fall through the cracks, they are the main communicator with each others’ teams (to prevent and resolve misunderstandings), etc. Just IMHO though.
A lot of them do mostly management and politics and “keeping the game good and liable to ever get finished”. But a lot of them mostly do art/code/design instead, and their management is light.
Creative Director
The person who controls the creative vision for the game, making sure everyone else knows what it is, and also making sure it’s consistent, going in the right direction, etc. For overall game design, the buck stops here.
See also this post on what I look for when hiring a Creative Director.
Game Director
Sometimes a synonym for Exec Producer (for studios where game projects are mostly run by good organizational people). Otherwise, (where projects are mostly run by good designers), this is probably the closest equivalent to a movie Director – someone who runs the overall game, not in terms of Project Management, but in terms of controlling the complete, final, product.
Design Director
…seems to be a fairly uncommon synonym for “Creative Director” – I’d guess there’s some differentiation, but I haven’t heard of enough places that have both to know what the standard differences are. The only studios I can specifically remember that have this are parts of Disney – although I have a vague memory that EA might have (had?) them.
Designer vs Producer
[ooh. This bit was going to be exciting. I was going to say some choice comments about “Producers who are frustrated Game Designers, but secretly want to be Executive Producers so that they can *order* the Lead Game Designer to make the game the way they want, instead of having to argue with them all the time. Lead Programmers who are frustrated Game Designers are pretty bad too, but aren’t usually so good at the “escalate myself via promotion until I can FORCE you to do it my way”, so not quite so dangerous]
MMO Designers
(courtesy of Steve Wartofsky)
Balance designer
This is someone who lives “primarily in the spreadsheets,” and is very focused on the numeric systems underlying things like spawn rate, density of mobs in a zone, attack, defense, detect ranges and strengths, etc. etc. – back in the old days of turn-based historical wargaming design, for instance, this would be the primary design focus. Craig Taylor, Sr., is an example of someone whose specialty is in this area. He’s currently at Breakaway Games in MD, but his knowledge goes all the way back to the days of designing a number of board and card games for Avalon Hill.
Systems designer
This is someone who may be the same as 1., or may instead work more in the area of scripted AI, control design (for combat and character manipulation), may be part of a team that works on interface and UI design more generally, may be responsible in an MMO (Scott Jennings being an example) of understanding how AI and pathfinding issues are not only designed on the client side but how those issues are abstracted, simplified and represented on the server side, and have nothing to do with balance whatsoever, except insofar as they will have to coordinate with the balance designer to make sure that whatever systems they are responsible have the necessary elements for tuning and balance that the balance designer needs to work with.
Quest designer
Yes, in our world, I would at this point break this out for MMOs at least as a full-time specialty; in companies like Bioware, this is probably a full-time specialty even in a single-player game, or single-player game with peer-to-peer multiplayer capability. The quest designer is responsible for understanding how to populate the quest system with the kind of content needed, at the right delivery rate (size, rhetorical style, voice and pace – all skills more related to training in theatrical or writing disciplines than the above two specialties), at the right level and style of language for the target audience. Someone doing quest design for a Splinter Cell or Killzone or Call of Duty game would want to be pretty well boned up on the style of communications, say, in a military or espionage framework, given a particular historical or imaginary scenario, and would need to be able to deliver a series of quests (informed by the context designed by the content designer, coming up next!) that both make sense in that context, and ring true to the kinds of conventions people would expect in this kind of game from having seen action movies and the dialogue style that exists in such movies. Companies like Bioware might assign as many as six or more quest designers to a single-player game project, where quest design is a central part of the content design (Knights of the Old Republic, for instance).
Content designer
This category could be broken up into a number of specialties, depending on the project, but at the fundamental level, the content designer works closely with the Creative Director for the project to develop backstory, mythology, character concept design, situation and environment concept design (in the form of documents; this person will ideally work closely with a team of visual concept designers, iteratively, to flesh out a style for the concept for a game that is both consistent and plausible at the IP level, and supported by a visual style that provides trademark-able quality for same). The content designer informs the whole project with the overall scope necessary to contain and execute a vision that is competitive in the current market with other games in the same genre, and will have expertise that is focused in a particular genre, ideally; at this point, it is getting harder and harder to simply “morph” a content designer from one genre into one for another, you really need someone with competence in the genre to execute successfully in this area these days, to provide a competitive product.
Environment Designer / World Builder
The environment designer echoes and works closely with the content designer to develop the environmental style and structure for the gameplay. The world builder/environment designer also has to work closely with the balance and systems designers, to understand the scale of a zone/area in a game sufficiently to create an environment that feels right for the type of game being developed. The world builder/environment designer has to be able to work with the technological aspects of things like tuning grids, environmental grid overlays for AI, AI pathing and pathfinding (whether scripted or generated, depending on the type of game), so that s/he can operate competently in the development of environments for a game.
There are others, but those are the key disciplines. On a typical full-scale team for a full-scale project, there are multiples of all of the above, in the case of WoW, for instance, many many multiples. And the above categories may be organized into different groups working on different areas or themes for the game. You may also get breakouts of character designers, VO designers (who should, ideally, be working with professional VO directors), audio designers, music designers, all as specialties that drive the production teams working in these areas with specific ideas, integrated with and iterated against the above design categories, who are representatives on the design team for all the different areas of content development for a game.
As Steve put it: “a little five-minute précis on the way games in North America are developed these days. ;)”
Some alternative viewpoints…
Creative Directors considerd harmful
Brian Green (Psychochild) ponders What is a Game Designer? – (“The primary job of a designer is communication … Not Really the Idea Person”)