Category Archives: Game Production
The Many Meanings Behind The Term “Game Developer”
When I first started in the game industry over thirty-five years ago, I was kind of embarrassed to admit to people that I was a game developer; it sounded like a job that a real grown-up shouldn’t have. Or, when I did admit it, people would look confused at first and then say, “Oh, you’re a programmer.” That was true for my first couple of years in the game industry, until I became a game producer, and then it was hard to explain to people what I do for a living.
These days, it’s kind of cool to be a game developer — especially if you’re an indie game developer. But a lot of people are confused about what a game developer is, even the people who say they want to be one. Many think that a game developer is a game programmer, but that’s not necessarily so.
A game developer is a person or company that makes games. It’s a broad term that covers actually a lot of territory.
A company that makes games is also called a game studio. An example is Insomniac Games, the game developer that created Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet & Clank.
A game studio is not the same as a game publisher, which is a company that finances, markets and sells games. Electronic Arts is an example of a game publisher. Many game publishers also are game developers or own game studios to make some of the games they publish. However, an independent game studio, like Insomniac, is not owned or controlled by a game publisher and is free enter into publishing agreements with different companies.
Now, an indie game developer is not necessarily the same as an independent game studio. Indie developers are small teams or individuals who usually work without significant financial support of a video game publisher or other outside source. But a large and successful independent game studio might be comprised of multiple development teams and their projects are usually funded by a publisher with whom they have a publishing agreement.
Confused? It gets worse. As I said above, a game developer can either be a company or an individual.
When talking about game developers as individuals, most people assume that a game developer is the same as a game programmer. It is true that game programmers are indeed often called “developers”, as well as “coders” and “engineers”, but actually the term “game developer” can apply to any person on a game development team: a designer, an artist, an audio specialist, a producer, or a tester.
Then there are those people who say they want to be a game developer, thinking that they will be doing the design AND programming AND art AND audio on a game. Everything. And not just a casual browser game — they mean a AAA game like Call of Duty or League of Legends. These are the people who don’t realize that AAA games are made by teams numbering in the hundreds, with each person doing a very specialized task.
So, the next time you hear someone say they want to be a “game developer”, ask them for specifics about what they want to do. That alone will tell you how much they really understand the game industry.
A Game Designer Is Not The Same Thing As A Game Artist
There seems to be a common misconception that a game designer is the same thing as a game artist. Students and wannabe game developers have told me that want to be a game designer and create all the concept artwork for a game — or, alternately, they are concerned that about not much skilled in drawing. Apparently, they have the perception that a game designer’s come up with an idea for a game, draws a lot of sketches about how that game should look, and then passes those sketches off to someone else to do while waiting for their royalty checks to roll in.
That fact is that game designers do not need to be very good at drawing. At most, a typical game designer may sketch out the structure of the game’s menu, the placement of buttons and other user interface elements on a screen, or the layout of a level. However, there are many good tools that can assist you in these tasks.
Writing is a far more valuable skill for a game designer to have, as well as the drive to work hard throughout the game’s development.
These are the main tasks of a game designer:
- Take a game idea (the idea may be someone else’s, such as the manager of a studio or a producer at a publisher) and work out all the details that make it a complete design: goals, obstacles, resources, rules, controls, story, and so on. For a large-scale game, this means creating one or multiple game design documents that are hundreds of pages long, full of tables, formulas, and diagrams explaining how the game will work in sufficient detail that all the programmers, artists, and sound engineers can figure out what their tasks are.
- Possibly create a rough paper or digital prototype of the game to test and nail down the rules and other game elements before it goes on to the development team.
- Conduct playtest sessions with groups of playtesters, record their reactions to the game, analyze the results, and make necessary modifications to the design that will create the experience they were trying to create.
The task of creating sketches for a game’s characters, objects, and environments is that of a concept artist. Some game designers are also concept artists, but most are not. Concept artists are specialists who are skilled in illustration or fine art.
They are also commercial artists, in that they have a client (the designer) for whom they work. They create illustrations of the game characters, objects and environments described by the game designer, and if approved, these illustrations are used by the other artists on the art team for to create models, textures, animations, and levels.
Game designers and game artists both apply creativity in their craft, but their skills and responsibilities are very different from each other.
David Mullich 