FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

The Game Design Team Roles

A large video game is almost always designed by a team. Unlike Hollywood, in which guilds and unions define the job roles, the game industry's job titles and responsibilities are not standardized from one company to another. Companies tend to give people titles and tasks in accordance with their abilities and, more important, the needs of a project. However, over the years a few roles have evolved whose responsibilities are largely similar regardless of what game or project they are part of.

■ Lead Designer. This person oversees the overall design of the game and is responsible for making sure that it is complete and coherent. She is the "keeper of the vision" at the highest and most abstract level. She also evangelizes the game to others both inside and outside the company and is often called upon to serve as a spokesperson for the project. Not all the lead designer's work is creative. As the head of a team, she trades away creativity for authority, and her primary role is to make sure that the design work is getting done and the other team members are doing their jobs properly. A project has only one lead designer.

■ Game Designer. The game designer defines and documents how the game actu­ally works: its gameplay and its core mechanics. Game designers also conduct background research and assemble data that the game may need. On a large proj­ect, these jobs may be split up among several game designers, all reporting to the lead designer.

■ Level Designer/World Builder. Level designers take the essential components of the game provided by the other designers—the user interface, core mechanics, and gameplay—and use those components to design and construct the individual levels that the player will play through in the course of a game. Level design used to be considered an inferior position to game designer, but modern level designers frequently need to be able to build 3D models and program in scripting languages.

As a result, level design is now a specialized skill, or set of skills, and is considered just as important as game design. A project usually has several level designers reporting either to a lead level designer or to the lead designer.

■ User Interface Designer. If a project includes user interface design as a sepa­rate role, it's performed by one or more people responsible for designing the layout of the screen in the various gameplay modes of the game and defining the function of the input devices. In large, complex games, this can easily be a full-time task. An otherwise brilliant game can be ruined by a bad user interface, so it is a good idea to have a specialist on board. (See Figure 2.7 for a notorious example.) Large devel­opers are increasingly turning to usability experts from other software industries to help them test and refine their interfaces.

■ Writer. Writers are responsible for creating the instructional or fictional content of the game: introductory material, back story, dialog, cut-scenes (noninteractive narrative video clips), and so on. Writers do not, generally speaking, do technical writing—that is the responsibility of the game designers. Few games require a full­time writer; the work is often subcontracted to a freelancer or done by one of the other designers.

Two other positions have a large amount of creative influence on a game, although they do not normally report to the lead designer. Rather, they are people with whom a game designer can expect to have a lot of interaction over the course of a project.

■ Art Director. The art director, who may also be called the lead artist, manages production of all the visual assets in the game: models, textures, sprites, animations,

user interface elements, and so on. The art director also plays a major role in creat­ing and enforcing the visual style of the game. Within the team hierarchy, the art director is usually at the same level as the lead designer, so it is imperative that the two of them have a good working relationship and similar goals for the project.

■ Audio Director. Like the art director, the audio director of a game oversees pro­duction of all the audible assets in the game: music, ambient sounds, effects, and dialog or narration. Typically there is not as much of this material as there is of art­work, so the audio director may be working on several projects at once. Audio is critical to creating a mood for the game, and the lead designer and audio director work together to establish what kinds of sounds are needed to produce it.

Do not treat the design work as a democratic process in which each person's opinion has equal value (“design by committee”). One person must have the authority to make final decisions, and the others must acknowledge this person's authority.