How to Get into Game Development? Part 1 - Roles

As of 2023, the Indian video games industry employed 100,000 people. While this figure may seem modest compared to the traditional IT sector, industry forecasts suggest that this number could surge to 400,000 employees by the end of this decade, with growth expected to accelerate well beyond that. In other words, the video games industry is on the cusp of the kind of boom that the IT industry faced in the late 1990s to the early 2000s. For India’s youth, this could very well be the next major career boom, with demand for skilled game developers far outpacing supply.

However, while the idea of getting paid to make games may seem glamorous, it’s important to recognize that game development encompasses six distinct career streams. The question is: have you carefully considered which of these paths aligns best with your skills and aspirations?

If this question resonates with you, this article aims to provide crucial insights into the various roles within the game industry, helping to clarify any potential misconceptions.  

Roles in Game Development

Game Designer:

This is an individual who is primarily responsible for crafting the experience and identity of the video game through all means (team, tech, process) available. In other words, think of them as somewhat of an equivalent of a movie director.   

Similar to how a movie director does not have to know how to do VFX or editing themselves, a game designer does not have to know how to do programming or game art. Knowing those additional skills helps for sure but it is not a designer’s job to be good at it, that’s why game studios hire artists and programmers. 

So what exactly does a game designer do? Quite a bunch of things like, 

• Ideation of high-level gameplay and story concepts.
  

• Game Writing - Writing a story outline first and then expanding upon it to write a full-fledged narrative script for the game. Writing the UI texts, in-game hints, lore etc. 
  

• Tonal Design — Identifying and crafting the relevant tone, mood & overarching experience to extract the right kind of emotional response from players as they interact with the game. The decisions of a game designer here strongly influence the art direction of the game.
  

• Narrative Design—  The process of converting a written story into an interactive gameplay experience by creating the right balance of engagement, immersion and tension.
  

• Quest Design— Breaking down the game into a series of missions/quests via appropriate objectives/goals to facilitate story and player progression.
  

• Gameplay Design — Crafting the interactive experience via designing gameplay rules, control schemes, game flow & game loops. In other words, the core objective of the gameplay design is to make the players feel like they are in the shoes of the character they are controlling within the game.
  

• Game Balancing — Tweaking the game features to present a challenge that’s neither frustratingly hard nor boringly easy but rather provides an exciting challenge. Game designers do this by constantly playtesting the game to make iterative improvements.
  

• Level Design — Designing the layouts and architecture of the game worlds that are intuitive & fun to navigate, visually convey some story elements and further drive a certain tone and mood through evocative environmental layouts. Level design helps in achieving the intended quest, tonal, gameplay & narrative design goals as the players explore the game via the levels/spaces.
  

• Technical & Systems Design — Deciding the logic & intended behaviour for in-game AI, camera, physics, skill trees and all other systems within a game. This is supposed to be used as a design blueprint by the programmers to code the feature sets of the game.
  

• Accessibility Design — Designing the games with certain software and UI considerations to make them playable for people with disabilities in sight, hearing, cognitive & motor skills.
  

• Game Economy Design — Creating a monetization structure & model and also a sustainable virtual in-game economy that drives the monetization of the game. Economy design is mostly relevant only in multiplayer and free-to-play games.
  

• Vision & Tone Hammering — Clearly communicating the intended vision and tone with the rest of the team and making sure they are aligned to it to extract the right kind of work that’s needed. Often this process requires beating out the rough edges in ideas for them to fit within the games’ vision and tone and thus the term “Hammering”

Game Artist

This is an individual who does all the visual wonders you see in the game like the digital characters, creatures, environments, props/objects and animations in both 3D and 2D formats. 

Here are the things that game artists do - 

• Concept Arts — Based on the Game Designer’s input, they create visual ideation and simple sketches to nail the look and feel of the characters, environments and props. These concept arts will then be used as a reference by the 3D modelers, sculptors and texturing artists when they do their work.

Concept Arts

• Modeling — The process through which a base 3D object like a character, prop or an environment object like a building/tree is created. An example image is attached below.

Model of a Human Character

• Sculpting — The process through which finer and higher level of detailing is done on a 3D object to make it look better. An example is attached below.

• Texturing & Baking  — The process of coloring and assigning material properties to a 3D object

• Key Frame Animation  — The process of adding movements to characters. To make human-like digital characters move and perform bodily actions. (This is another skill area that India lacks, please note movie animation and game animation are vastly different and most skill sets won’t transfer between them)
  

• Rigging — To do animations, the artists have to first do rigging. This is a process through which they develop a skeletal structure for a 3D character and place it within a character model. Through the use of this skeletal structure, the animations can be added and tweaked.

• Weight Painting — Skin, muscles and cloth on a 3D character compress, expand, stretch and bend in particular ways. The process of achieving this is called Weight Painting.

• Motion Capture Animation - These days game productions are increasingly relying on the motion capture method for animations, thus game animators often supervise the entire motion capture pipeline right from the shoot to the post-process wherein the captured animation data is cleaned and converted to the usable game-ready format.
  

• Lighting - Adding lighting to the virtual worlds (Levels/Scenes) of the game to bring the intended art direction and mood.

Here is the difference between the game with lighting VS without lighting
byu/OkbaAmrate inUnity2D

Post Processing — Adding and tweaking a wide range of in-engine final touches like color grading and a range of camera effects that enhance the final visual output to look better.

Game Programmer

This is an Individual who is responsible for bringing everything within the game to life and turning it into a playable video game via software engineering. 

Here are the various things they do - 

• Architecting the codebase and coding standards for a game
  

• Writing clean and efficient code that’s modular and scalable to build all game features, systems and gameplay mechanics.
  

• Integrating and tweaking external APIs and SDKs to support seamless function between external software tools and their usage within the game
  

• Writing necessary scripts for efficient communication between the front end and back end of the games, especially in multiplayer games.
  

• Integrating all the game objects (3D/2D) with the code and making sure it works as per the design
  

• Documenting and maintaining the codebase
  

• Responsible for maintaining a proper version control system for the whole project(s) - Think GitHub or its equivalents.
  

• Creating proprietary software tools and technologies in-house to solve and improve the game mechanics-related drawbacks and improve workflow efficiency
  

• Resolving/bug-fixing code-based issues to make sure everything is functioning as per the design
  

• Optimizing the CPU/RAM requirements of a game so that it runs smoothly on the target hardware
  

• Creating functioning game builds (executable/playable game) that runs on target hardware
  

• Porting the game to different hardware-software platforms like Windows, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Android and iOS. 

Technical Artist

This is an Individual who is somewhat of a mixture between a Game Programmer and a Game Artist and act as the bridge between design, art and programming by creating various cross-disciplinary graphics tools and processes for the efficient production of the game. 

Here’s a list of things that Technical Artists tend to do - 

• Documenting and maintaining the graphics and shader stack of the game.
  

• Graphics/Shader Programming — Shader is a code that runs on the graphics card and instructs it on how to render the visuals and graphics on the screen. Shader code helps achieve the intended visual look and feel of a game’s art style.

• Integrating and tweaking external graphics APIs and SDKs like Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL, DLSS, FSR etc to support the seamless function of those plugins within the game.
  

• Resolving/bug-fixing graphics-based issues to make sure all visual aspects of the game are as per the design
  

• Graphics Optimization — Games are rendered in real-time and thus, streaming speed and storage should be optimized as much as possible for the game to run smoothly. This is where Technical Artists optimize the graphics pipeline to fit the streaming and storage limits/budgets of every level across the game.
  

• Creating proprietary software tools and technologies in-house to solve and improve the art/graphics pipeline drawbacks and improve art workflow efficiency

Game Tester

This is an individual who is responsible for making sure that the game and all of its features, systems and mechanics function as intended via rigorous testing and providing feedback to the development team. This discipline often acts as the external set of eyes and the first line of defense. 

Here’s what a game tester does - 

• Meticulously and continuously play a level and repeat the same actions dozens or hundreds of times in all possible permutations and combinations to ensure all gameplay features and mechanics are properly working
  

• When things don’t work as intended, isolate the problem area and re-test them under different scenarios to narrow down the source of the problem(s)
  

• Figure out how to replicate a bug (Regression) in runtime.
  

• Thoroughly document the process of testing and produce the same for the programming and/or art teams to help them fix the bugs and issues.

Game Producer

This is an individual who is responsible for making sure the game launches on the intended release date by managing and aligning all the studio resources. 

Note - Game producers are required to have a great understanding of the creative and technical workflow of game development which is why most if not all game producers come from game development backgrounds mentioned above rather than from a pure business management background. 

Here’s what a game producer does - 

• Assessing the risky areas of development with high dependency and frontloading (prioritizing) them to the beginning of the production schedule
  

• Preparing a high-level project schedule and budget
  

• Preparing a production roadmap with milestones
  

• Breaking down the schedule into features and tasks based on the milestones
  

• Pre-emptively identifying and managing areas of dependencies and bottlenecks to maximize productivity and minimize delays by process improvement, documentation and tools.
  

• Playing the devil’s advocate for new feature requests from the development teams to control feature creep (ballooning of scope)
  

• Managing the various development teams and acting as a communication bridge between those departments and addressing their issues to make sure their voices are heard.
  

• Acting as the communication bridge between the development teams and the upper management/stakeholders to make sure all parties are informed about the project's progress at every step of the way. Producers are also the one point of contact between the development company and the publishers and platform holders.
  

• Identifying the right external partners/vendors, negotiating contracts and ensuring on-time delivery of tasks.
  

• Coordinating with the HR department for the hiring and onboarding process
  

• Coordinating with the marketing team to prepare marketing objectives and plans for campaigns, community engagement, PR, sales, release management and brand positioning
  

• Coordinating and managing logistics for events/expos alongside the marketing team and external partners
  

• Coordinating with the finance team on Internal bookkeeping to facilitate the preparation of various books of accounts, financial reports, statutory and compliance checks & filings and reviewing them
  

• Coordinating with the finance team on risk assessments, financial projections, strategizing cost efficiency and product/service pricing.
  

• Coordinating with the finance team on executing employee payrolls, vendor payments and collecting advances and revenue earnings from publishers/platforms

Now that the six roles in game development have been thoroughly explained, how do you determine which career pathway is the right choice for you? The answer hinges on two key factors: 

1. Your natural inclinations and sensibilities

2. Your existing transferable skills and knowledge

Throughout the breakdown of the various roles, you may have felt a particular inclination towards one role or the other. This instinct—whether you call it a gut feeling or your heart’s desire—reflects an innate sensibility toward a particular craft. 

However, it’s important to temper instinct with rationale. To make a well-rounded decision, evaluate the pre-existing skills and knowledge you’ve accumulated over the years.. If you already possess a set of transferable skills, why let them go to waste? Leveraging your existing expertise could fast-track your journey in game development.

To clarify your direction, take a moment to reflect on your past experiences and ask yourself the following questions:

1. What hobbies have you pursued outside of playing video games?
   

2. What stream did you choose in the 11th grade—science or commerce?
   

3. If you are pursuing or have completed a bachelor’s degree, what was your focus?
   

4. Have you completed any vocational courses or certifications? If so, in what field?
   

5. Did you participate in any internships, and what skills or lessons did you gain from them? 

With the answers to these questions in hand, here is how you can gain a headstart in your professional game development career. 

• If you possess a degree of traditional fine arts and digital art skills, pursuing advanced education and training in Game Art is a smart move.
  

• If you possess a degree of coding and software development skills, particularly in C++ or C#, then Game Programming is the pathway for you.
  

• If your background and skill set doesn’t align with either of these, but you have a creative yet analytic mindset coupled with strong communication skills, consider exploring careers in Game Design and/or Game Testing.
  

It’s worth noting that roles like Game Producer and Technical Artist typically aren’t entry-level positions. Professionals are often promoted to these roles from other areas within the industry.

Following these suggestions can provide you with a sense of clarity and direction. However, as with any career, there is much more to explore. 

The next article in this series will dive into the options available for you in terms of formal education that you can pursue for these game development job roles, what kind of salary packages you can expect and what is the demand and supply scenario for these roles, so stay tuned for that. 

from AFK Gaming https://ift.tt/tYScfPo