“Game design is like architecture” – video game jobs described by those who do them
The game industry is big, but you probably knew that already. If you have ever sat through the credits of a modern triple-A game, you will know just how much work goes into these projects, just how many people are involved – pages and pages of seemingly endless names scroll by as each experience comes to a close.
Publishers such as Ubisoft and EA even use multiple studios to work on different aspects of games, perhaps getting a racing game studio in to tweak vehicle handling in an open world game, or getting FPS experts to fine tune the shooting.
From the animation to the art, from the gameplay to online infrastructure, from concept to marketing, there are many disciplines involved. That's why we've put together this resource after chatting with people from all over the industry, so we can all better understand what it takes to make a video game and release it into the world.
Game designer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
I'm Brenda Romero, and I am a game designer. I've run the whole gamut of game design, from junior game designer to design director to chief creative officer. I am a lifer in the game industry, having gotten my start in 1981 when I was just 15 years old. At that time, my job was the dream job for any kid – play games, memorise them and when people call with questions, tell them what they need to know. I grew into the design role from there. Over the years, I had an opportunity to work with many gifted game designers, and I learned the ropes from them. Apprenticeship was quite literally the only way to learn. I went to college where my major was technical writing, an even mix of programming and writing, and continued working in the industry to put myself through school. I am often asked why I decided to get into games, but I don't remember ever making that decision. For me, it's been much more of a calling, something I have to do. I am not sure what I would do if I had to do anything else.
What does the role involve?
I often compare game designers to architects when describing what it is I do. In order to build a house, it first has to be designed, and there are loads of systems in that house (electrical, heating, etc). Games are similar. At the highest level, my job is about having a vision for a game and maintaining that vision throughout its development, making sure that the systems – combat, character, economic, etc – are working together to give the experience that I want them to give. Game designers are also experience planners. So, while the architect might design the house, it's nothing without something happening inside of it. So, I spend most of my time thinking about the second-to-second play.
The big moments are not what sustain a game. If you can't hold people second-to-second, you can forget about your minute-to-minute, much less holding them to the end. Game designers spend a lot of their time imagining “what if” scenarios, writing specs for the team to implement and playing the game to see how things were implemented. Nowadays, the role of game designer is pretty specialised. So, you might have a single person designing a single sharable moment for a triple-A game, a facet of combat or writing the dialog for a single character. On smaller projects, a designer handles many different facets of the game. For me, there are two critical things that are often overlooked in game design education: I spend a lot of time thinking about the UI of the game because that's the place where the play really happens, where the systems meet the player. I also spend a lot of time listening to the ways I could make the game better. No one gets it right the first time, and if you work with a great team like I do, it's important to facilitate and ask for feedback. Welcome it when you get it.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
Many games have character creation. As a game designer, character creation starts out as just a concept that I need to design and spec out so that it can be created by code, art, and audio. When I'm thinking about how I want character creation to flow, I am thinking first of theme – how can I get the theme of the game into every step of play? I don't want it to feel like you're stepping through a necessary process. I want it to feel like opening a door into a world you're eager to get into. I am next thinking about affordances. What does the player expect of this process having been through it many times? I like to use the example of deciding to change the keybinding for FPS games. I mean, you could launch with something different, but those bindings are baked in for many players over many games and many years. It's a risk. If you look at any character screen in any game, it was a game designer with input from her team that decided what you could see, how it interacted with other things, which data was necessary (starting stats, for instance) and what happened when you made all the decisions necessary. Once it's implemented, designers go over it again and again to make sure that it feels they way they wanted it to feel.
I am often in a situation where I see John working on a level, and when you're playing a Romero level, what you're seeing is the result of literally thousands of plays. Every change, every seemingly minor tweak, he's in the game again seeing how it looks, how it feels, how it surprises.
Studio head
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Mike Bithell: I studied game design at university, and was lucky enough to get a job only a few months after graduating as a junior game designer at Blitz games. I then worked my way up the ranks there, as a concept and level designer. I then moved to London to work at Bossa Studios as their lead designer for a few years. In my spare time, I made a game called Thomas Was Alone, which did well enough that I could go start my own team. We've now been going for five years, shipped four games, and are doing ok!
What does the role involve?
I am ultimately responsible for all the creative output of my studio, and more generally share responsibility for all company decisions with my business partner, Alexander Sliwinski. On a day to day level, I write and direct all our games, and collaborate with a team to get them to release.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
Let's do Subsurface Circular. I initially came up with the idea of a detective game, and started researching the genre. I then brought in a coder to build the tools, and a couple of artists to start honing the look. Every day then became a bunch of writing, and a lot of conversations and meetings with every creative involved. My job is mostly one of curation, making sure that everything comes together and fits. Subsurface Circular was unique for the amount of my own, unfiltered work is in it: I had to write all the text, and there's a profound amount of it due to the branching nature of the game. After release, I am also usually the primary person speaking about the game, doing interviews and stuff.
Lead character artist
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Gavin Goulden: Currently I am the lead character artist at Insomniac Games working on Spider-Man. Prior to this, I was the lead on Sunset Overdrive and BioShock Infinite. In addition to this, I have been a character artist on Dead Rising 2, The Bigs 2, and contributed to titles such as FEAR 2, Dragon Age, and Damnation.
What does the role involve?
As a lead character artist, a large part of my job is giving feedback to my team as a form of quality control, encouraging career growth within my team of artists, assisting with art direction and maintaining a consistent art style, scheduling tasks, communicating expectations with other departments, and working with publishers on milestone deliverables. This differs from a character artist role as my priorities shift from creating art 100% of the time to bigger picture tasks and managing a team of artists.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
As an example, since it has been released and I can talk about it, on Sunset Overdrive I took on the entire vanity / character creation system. This means original prototyping with technical artists, setting standards for my team to follow, plotting out the amount of items we would create and where they would land on the schedule, and worked with design to make sure there were enough unique options for a satisfying experience.
Voice actor
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Cissy Jones: I've been a voice actor for about seven years. Before that, I'd been a working stiff in the Silicon Valley – so I definitely come at it from a different perspective than most. My first job as a VA was Katjaa in Telltale's The Walking Dead. From there, I've gone on to work in several titles, from indies like Firewatch to triple-A like Destiny 2. (I should also mention that while I work a lot in games, as a full time VA it's important to be versatile, so I also work in other mediums; commercials, animation, trailers, promos, long-form narration, etc).
What does the role involve?
My role in a game is usually one of the last things to happen. There is typically a large time devoted to the actual development of the game and characters, artistically and narratively, before voice actors are brought in. Then we bring the words to life. I always think of my job as making the devs' life easier – bringing their vision off the page and into existence. If I've done my job right, everyone's happy.
I like to prepare for a role as much as possible, which can be tricky in the games industry with NDAs and whatnot. But if I am given context ahead of time, I like to immerse myself in who the character is, what situations they're engaged in, what their goals are, etc. Again – doesn't always happen, but when I can, I do.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
I am responsible for making players care about my character. They have to care about what I'm saying, even if I'm ‘just an NPC', because I'm giving directives or necessary information for their missions. That means I also need to be believable at all times, whether I'm playing an unseen fire lookout on a walkie talkie, an alien, or an anthropomorphic stick of gum.
Lead programmer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
My name is Richard May and I've been in the industry for about 17 years now. I started as a junior programmer straight out of university, joining the graduate scheme at Codemasters. That job promptly evaporated underneath me (financial difficulties meant that I was laid off after three months) but that “toe in the door” meant I got an interview at Rebellion. I started as a junior coder working on their GBA titles, hammering out GBA ports of other games on what were, looking back now, ludicrously short timescales. It was all very sink-or-swim but luckily we got through and after a year I moved on to work on the company's console titles. After about six years working up the ranks as a gameplay programmer on numerous PC, Xbox, and PS2 titles, I became lead programmer on Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron for the PSP. Since then I've led projects on PSP, PC, console, mobile and, most recently, PSVR, Oculus & Vive.
What does the role involve?
My role as a lead programmer is mostly a managerial one. Whilst I do still get to write code from time to time, most of my work is spent guiding my team to ensure they have everything they need to implement the various game systems in a timely fashion. Game development requires input from a lot of different disciplines and this often creates bottlenecks where you're waiting on art, design or sound input. My job is to schedule the coding tasks to ensure they flow as smoothly as possible, helping to define the tasks themselves with designers and artists to ensure the programmers have a clear brief and can get on without asking too many questions.
I work closely with the lead artist, designer, and producer (as well as other departments such as sound and animation) to map out what needs to be done to make the game, advising on not only what is possible but also what is practical in the time we have and the hardware we're targeting. I'm also responsible for ensuring the game runs at an acceptable frame rate and is as bug-free as possible. Later in the project, my day-to-day is mostly about fielding bug reports from QA, assigning them out to the relevant coders and ensuring the most important things are fixed first.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
As an example, a designer will be tasked with working up a plan for a specific feature – say a new game mechanic. We'll discuss it initially and then, after the plan had been written up, sit down with the various parties (design, art, production, etc.) and discuss whether its feasible and what changes might need to be made. Given that plan, I would then break it down into individual tasks in Jira, our online task-tracking system. Each task would then be assigned to a relevant programmer – often one programmer will do the bulk of the work, but I prefer to spread the knowledge around the team where I can to prevent any one programmer being responsible for the whole system.
Once work is underway, I'll review their progress periodically, discussing any issues with the implementation and design as they occur, making sure the design team is kept in the loop if anything in the original plan turns out to be impractical. Once the tasks are completed, we'll review the feature to ensure that it fulfils the original brief. Few features survive this process unscathed and the end result is often very different to the original plan – once a designer can actually play with the new feature they'll give us feedback and I'll take that feedback and make new tasks for the programmers and we'll iterate from there. Occasionally, a feature might even get dropped entirely, but if I'm doing my job properly we shouldn't get to that stage very often!
Lead developer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Jagex Maz: I didn't go to university. Instead i went straight from sixth form college into a network support role. I was responsible for everything from building servers and network wiring to user support and purchasing. This gave me a really good practical technical background.
13 years ago I relocated to Cambridge and was lucky enough to get a job in customer support with Jagex. Nine months later (still without a degree) I joined the then very small content team working on RuneScape. I obtained my Open University degree last year, after nine years of study whilst working full-time.
I don't feel that the lack of degree, or being female held me back. Sure I get the incredulous looks of “but you can't possibly be technical, you're female” and generally smile and carry on.
What does the role involve?
My basic day to day responsibilities are coming up with ideas, designing and programming content for the Old School game using our in house language and tools. I also do a tiny bit of 3D modelling and 2D art as and when it is required, as we are a very small team.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
Since then I have built up more responsibilities. I have written and administrate recruitment and training for new developers. The lead role I am in sometimes includes line management, but I personally don't do that now. Instead, I share responsibility for compiling and deploying weekly updates to the game and rebooting the servers.
Game director
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
My name is Steve Thornton. I got my first games job at Traveller's Tales, after doing some work experience placements at their office while I was studying Games Design at University. I stayed at TT for just over five years, working my way up from junior games designer where I started, to lead level designer, senior games designer, assistant game director, and eventually, game director.
In August 2016 I left TT and moved to Saint Petersburg (Russia) where I am now lead games designer at Sperasoft, a company that offers co-development support and services to other game studios. Currently, we're assisting Ubisoft Montreal with the post-launch seasonal updates for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege.
What does the role involve?
The game director is the creative lead of the project, the closest thing to the legendary “ideas person”. They define what the game should be at the earliest stages, and then during development have veto power over any decision related to the game's content. Because triple-A games are so large, it is inevitable that as game director you must delegate the “detail” to others, which means your most important job is to clearly communicate the pillars of the game to the design team and departmental leads, entrusting them to make decisions that serve your high level goals for the game. During production, you will be constantly reviewing and approving the WIP content, answering questions, resolving conflicts and solving problems; all of which means a lot of time in meeting rooms. This is a full-time management job, and you are likely to never actually touch the engine or contribute so much as a single asset or line of code to the game yourself. You can choose when to intervene personally and when to delegate, but in triple-A it is likely that micro-management will turn sour for everyone involved.
In my experience working in the western part of the industry, game director and lead games designer are often interchangeable titles (in fact at TT, they changed titles during the five years I worked there) and the game director is also defacto lead of the games design team. At some of the largest game studios, there may be both a game director and a separate lead games designer – in these situations the lead games designer tends to assume a role as an assistant director, responsible for managing the games design team directly, making decisions with the team “on the ground” and ensuring they are meeting the directors' higher level goals. Having both roles pushes the game director into an even loftier position, usually doing their reviews of the actual game in bursts via builds and samples that have been pre-approved by the lead games designer. In these situations, game director feedback can seem unpredictable or belated, a common complaint within big triple-A teams.
Game directors don't have unlimited power, however. Unless they are integrated in the managing arm of the company at a corporate level, it is likely they still need to pitch their original game idea to a publisher or internal executive team for approval, and then continue to keep those people happy throughout development. Additionally, they are usually paired with a production lead who has equal (or slightly greater) power, which they're intended to exert dispassionately should the game directors requests risk the game missing its delivery dates – something that can be flagged by anyone on the team. Although this is inevitably a push and pull relationship rich in debate, a good game director fears project risks just as much as the producer, because ultimately it will affect the game's quality and the morale of the team – two priorities that should be shared by all leads.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
Content review: a game director spends a lot of time playing the game, either in regular builds or at pre-determined milestones in the schedule. Although the game director can't rationally participate in the design and implementation of every level, character, weapon and feature, they all pass by the director's desk for a seal of approval eventually. The job at that point is to identify any issues, provide clear action points of feedback, set new priorities, or schedule discussions with the team to find those action points. It's these reviews that move production forwards, and provide chances to check everyone is moving in the right direction.
AI programmer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
I'm Alex Darby and I started in the industry fresh out of uni (I have a joint degree in Comp. Sci. / AI & Psychology) 1996 as a “prototyping programmer” at Codemasters. Amongst others, I worked on the prototypes which went on to become Colin McRae Rally & ToCA Touring Cars.
In 2001 I moved to the now extinct Smart Dog (who would go on to become a victim of the great UK studio cull of the early PS2 era – 20 studios went bust in the space of 18 months I think; essentially because they all moved to PS2 too early) as the AI programmer on a racing game. As AI is so crucial to the player experience in racing games, I eventually ended up moving sideways back into design there and became the design manager for the company until it went bust. After that, I was a founding member of FreeStyleGames in 2003, focussing on triple-A console dev and we went from a team of six at the start to 150-ish in 2010, with a corresponding narrowing of individual focus.
In 2010, I went indie and now am a jack of all trades more than I ever was before, doing all the tedious admin of running a company, managing external relationships, finding paid work, and making my own game in-between.
What does the role involve?
Essentially, any behaviour that any non-human controlled entity in a game does can fall under the umbrella of AI. This ranges anywhere from choosing the correct animations to play when an entity is moving about, through steering to avoid or intercept objects, planning movement through environments, making decisions about tactical, strategic planning and decision making, and even stuff like dynamically changing the music, difficulty level, etc, in response to the player's actions in the game. The broad remit of the area means that ultimately even within “AI programmers” there are sub-categories and specialisms determined by the kind of games the particular programmer has worked on and their specific needs – for example, the AI in a racing game is very different to the AI in a fighting game, or in an RTS.
For many genres, AI programmers form a bridge between game design and programming, often working closely with designers to enable the game's vision and allow the designers access to highly customisable AI behaviours so that the set-up work involved in creating and tuning the AI can be parallelised out across multiple team members. I inadvertently specialised in racing game AI which – to do a good job of it – requires a solid understanding of physics, engineering control systems, and human psychology. Ultimately, the code which runs a racing game AI is very much in the same ballpark as the code which steers something like a guided missile or the auto-drive tech in a Tesla.
Day-to-day, this involves lots of 3D maths, lots of thinking about possible solutions, lots of googling and trawling through maths / engineering books to find and learn new maths or new applications of maths you already know to solve problems. Like much triple-A programming, you're typically solving problems that you don't know how to solve until you start and so specific in nature that often no-one else will ever have solved them before you do.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
So in any game there are typically multiple layers of AI behaviour running simultaneously and collaboratively to achieve the end goal. In a racing game at a base level this has steering, calculating optimal racing lines, reacting appropriately to avoid other cars, then you might have a meta layers which worry about stuff like team members, grudges between drivers, and the individual ability characteristics of the drivers. The solution I came up with to steering the car at optimal speed around an optimal racing line involves calculus, physics, and a bunch of associated mathematical transformations of the 3D track data into different mathematical domains to enable simpler mathematical reasoning about the numbers involved.
Higher level behaviours such as perceiving the positions and velocities of other cars and the changes in direction of the track might be modelled by further mathematical transformations – for example, the driving AI I made has virtual “eyes” which respond to relative velocity and distance, enabling them to reason in a very natural human way about the other cars and how to avoid them, etc. Ultimately, I think game programmers are in many ways a modern embodiment of the mid-20th century mad inventor archetype like Professor Branestawn – tinkering away in secret, producing weird and interesting interactivity by throwing their own ideas in with all the esoteric bits of knowledge they can dredge from the internet.
Producer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
My name is Sally Blake, I worked at Ubisoft for six years. I started in QA and worked as a tester for about a year and a half before moving into a production role, and worked my way up from there. I've always loved video games and it was always my aim to work in the industry, so it's been very cool to make it!
What does the role involve?
In terms of production, the main aim is to facilitate communication between development teams and ensure that whatever you are creating is on time, on budget, and at the best quality it can be. A lot of it is talking to people, removing any blockers and helping to solve issues. It's different every day, which is what is so appealing about it, plus you can spend a lot of your day trying to help people which makes it very rewarding! Production is especially useful for big teams – especially if they are cross-studio or cross-discipline.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
In terms of responsibilities, you may be responsible for delivering a game or part of a game. Responsibilities can be split by discipline, by feature, or a mix of both – it really depends how you want to structure the team. If you are responsible for delivering a piece of content, you will usually have a cross discipline team. For example, the team I had on The Division had UI artists, tech artists, UI programming, gameplay programming, design, and QA. So I think you have to have an understanding of the synergies between disciplines, and you are there to help facilitate what they need from each other. You are also there to make production plans, update on progress, and identify and mitigate any project risk.
Principal combat designer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Clint Bundrick: I've been in the games industry for about 17 years now. I started in the ATG group of Microsoft in the Wild West days during the development of the original Xbox. I was initially a contract tester and when it came time to go off to college they offered me a full-time job to stay as a lead. Since then, I've worked at High Voltage, EA Tiburon, Volition, Irrational, and now I'm back at Microsoft. I've made everything from sports and racing games to first-person shooters and open-world action games. I've been in a variety of game design roles including systems design, mission scripting, world building, vehicle creation/tuning, multiplayer, combat and level design. I'm currently a design director.
What does the role involve?
One of my previous roles was that of a principal combat designer. The role of a principal combat designer is to work closely with the design director and/or creative director to establish a vision for the core combat experience and game loops. This person leads a multi-discipline team that is responsible, all up, for the quality of the core combat mechanics. This can vary greatly, depending on the genre, but it includes weapons, abilities, core systems, player progression, encounter creation, AI, animation, and level design. Basically, anything having to do with character actions and how they are used in the game runs through this team and this role.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
The principal combat designer has to be able to work with every discipline and every sub-group within the studio as a result. This person has to be able to sell a vision for the combat experience and make the team believe it's going to be great. Principal combat designers often create a ‘combat bible' to do this. The goal of the combat bible is to help the rest of the team understand the philosophy behind the desired combat experience and what to expect from the tools they will have to build it. It usually covers all of the character actions along with the enemy list and their expected behaviours. It also touches on encounter composition principals, weapons, and any other detail the team needs in order to wrap their heads around the game they're making together. From there, this person leads the team responsible for the implementation, tuning, bug fixing and overall execution on all things combat.
Concept artist
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Anna Hollinrake: I studied Game Art at De Montfort University and I liked too much stuff, so I was pretty suited for indie development. I ended up in situations where I could both concept environments and then build them in 3D, which meant I could have a lot of ownership over the art style and tone. As time progressed, my work began to shift further toward concept art and visual development!
What does the role involve?
Research, sketching and painting! A lot of concept art is much less glamorous than the stuff you see released alongside games – it's much scrappier and messier. You're making something to communicate as quickly and clearly as possible what the final asset should look like, and so concepts can end up being a biro sketch on the back of some lined paper. It involves working closely with the designers and vision holders of the project to get the right mood and feel of the game or scene, and figuring out how to achieve that through the architectural styles, lighting, costume design – anything really.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
If there's an important asset in a scene that doesn't have a ‘look' yet, I would talk to the designer about what they envision for it and then do some quick look and feel concepts that get the right mood and general silhouette. Then we'd have another chat and figure out the nitty gritty details of it, and possibly make another concept of the asset by itself in neutral lighting for a 3D artist to work from.
Systems designer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Alex Trowers: I started out as a tester / level designer for Bullfrog back in 1990. Powermonger was my first game but after that it was everything from Populous 2 up to Dungeon Keeper 2. I think systems designer is one of the most important roles on a project, but then of course I'm going to say that.
I firmly believe that the ‘how' part of making a game is more important than the ‘why' – this has come around from a lifetime of people coming up to me and saying that they've got a great idea for a game but then proceeding to tell me a story, rather than how the game plays and how they're going to make it.
What does the role involve?
The systems designer needs to be able to come up with solutions to gameplay problems – how do the weapons work? how does the character jump or climb or use stamina or manipulate their inventory or cast spells or…
They then need to be able to communicate that design accurately and concisely to the rest of the team so that it can actually be implemented (this is often the hardest part).
You'll generally find that being a systems designer is a lot more about writing documentation than it is about actually building stuff – certainly in the early parts of the project. Although finding a team that likes to build things from a data-driven perspective is an absolute godsend. Find yourself a coder that likes to expose variables and you're away.
It also helps having an extensive library of games to play and an analytical approach to working out which bits of them worked and why. Even the bad games will help – sometimes it's not all about ‘what not to do' and they'll have little details that you might want to crib off later. In short – play lots of games. Lots of different games. All of the games.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
As for specific stuff I've designed, I'd say things like the combat AI in Dungeon Keeper 2, the base operations in Gene Wars, the weapons system in Battle Engine Aquila (although that was an extension of the same system we used in Syndicate), and most recently the spell casting in our mobile series, Glyph Quest. Then, of course, there's a whole bunch of projects with awesome systems that never saw the light of day for one reason or another
Particularly proud of the health, shotgun and zombie systems in City Of The Dead (an FPS from Kuju / Hip Interactive) and the charge / stun mechanic we were playing with for Champion's Alliance (a MOBA from Black Rock / Disney).
Character artist
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
I'm Liz Edwards, I'm from the UK and I'm currently living in Montreal and working as a freelance artist. My journey into games started at Teesside University where I studied Computer Games Art. There, I started learning 3D for the first time and I realised my dream job was creating 3D characters.
I went on to do an MA in Video Game Development at Birmingham City University. The course was structured like a small game development studio with students taking on specialised roles – I focussed on character art – and working together to create a PS4 vertical slice. From there, I got hired as a trainee character artist at Creative Assembly. I worked for Creative Assembly for 2.5 years on Total War: Warhammer where I got to work on all kinds of weird characters and creatures!
What does the role of a character artist involve?
Character artists are responsible for the creation of the 3D characters in a video game. The exact responsibilities of a character artist will vary from project to project – for example, on a smaller team, they may need to take on extra responsibilities like rigging and animation, and on larger teams their focus might be on a smaller area, such as clothing or hair.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
On Total War: Warhammer, character artists were responsible for creating entire characters from start to finish, so I'll go over that process:
First, we're provided with concept art – when I made the Treekin, I got to work from this amazing concept by Rich Carey.
Then, the high resolution model is made. This Treekin was a very organic character so I was able to sculpt it entirely in ZBrush, but different kinds of character would require different approaches. Notice the multiple heads, arms and shoulder pieces – these are modular and will be mix-and-matched later to create visual variations within a unit.
Next is retopology – the process of making the low resolution model that will go in the game. Generally, it involves drawing a nice, clean mesh by hand over the high resolution sculpt. This turns a multiple-million poly mesh into something a game engine can happily handle. This low poly mesh will be the right shape, but it has none of that lovely surface detail. To get that back, the low poly needs to be UV unwrapped – basically, flattened out like a sewing pattern. Then, the details from the high resolution mesh can be baked onto texture maps that will be applied to the low resolution model.
The final step is texturing the model, adding colours and material definitions – this is the stage where the wood on the Treekin really started looking like wood – and really making the characters come to life.
Quest designer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
My name is Luke Botham, I've been in the industry for a little over five years now. I began as an intern at Guerrilla (Sony) Cambridge. Shortly after completing this and returning to Uni, I was contacted about another internship at Guerrilla Amsterdam helping out with the Greenlight of their new IP. Two days later, I was sat running around and getting to grips with Aloy and her world.
I returned to uni to finish my degree, but ultimately made the move back to the Netherlands to work at Guerrilla. At this stage, Horizon was still in pre-production so I was hired as a junior designer – we were very fortunate to be offered the chance to pick the direction we'd like to specialise in when the scale and team ramped up, and I ended up as a quest designer.
What does the role involve?
In essence, a quest designer is responsible for the creation and implementation of a quest (akin to a mission in other genres), but depending on the type they can also be heavily involved with the concept and narrative. For something like a main quest, the majority of it is first dictated by the writers who have a specific vision for what they want to convey. As a designer, you'll then take this information and try to break it down into different gameplay chunks and suggest where other bits can be implemented.
A large part of this discussion is often about what is conveyed through a cinematic (which has the strength of ensuring the player sees the story you are trying to tell) and through gameplay (which the player might not approach in the manner you intended and can miss potentially key information). There are times where initially small inconsequential pieces will grow into more complex areas that need a large amount of time dedicated to them.
For a side quest, the story brief is generally a lot simpler and more of a rough guide for you to fill in the blanks – simply a jumping off point to get the tone and direction on the right track. There are also times that you might approach all this the other way and come up with a cool concept or setup that you can then working with the writers to justify narratively. Horizon features examples of all of these approaches.
Narrative lead
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Anna Megill: I've been in the industry for almost fifteen years now, working mostly as a writer and narrative designer. I got my start in QA at a small studio called Cyberlore, then worked on Hasbro's Littlest Pet Shop online game before moving to Seattle and a job at Nintendo.
Writing was my obvious interest and skill, so I volunteered to write any text the game needed: ad copy, UI text, game manuals, you name it. I started at ArenaNet as a QA Editor for the original Guild Wars, but quickly transitioned into a writing role on Guild Wars 2. Since then, I've worked on stories for Airtight/Square Enix, Ubisoft, Arkane, and a bunch of small indies. Now, I'm narrative lead at Remedy Entertainment, working on P7.
What does the role involve? Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
I've learned that titles mean different things at different companies, but at Remedy “narrative lead” means I own the story for P7. Sam Lake is our creative director and is the vision-holder for the project, so I make sure the project stays true to that vision. I'm loremaster and taskmaster rolled into one. I supervise a team of writers and narrative designers and help them realise the characters and map out the plot.
I coordinate with other teams – art, design, audio, programming, QA, etc – to make sure that our work flows together. Story is an important element of Remedy games, so everything needs to fit together seamlessly. But the job isn't just management. I'll write dialogue, lore documentation like our story bible, trailers, give notes and feedback, go to VO sessions and brief actors on their roles, and help process scripts as they go through the narrative pipeline. In short, my role is making sure that every element of the game works with the story we're telling.
Physics game programmer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
I'm Ale Cámara (pronounced like Alex without the ‘x'), a Spanish physics game programmer. As a kid I didn't know I could work as a game programmer, so I studied physics instead of computer science or game development. After a MSc in Theoretical Physics, I finished a PhD in Optics.
During my PhD I discovered that I didn't see myself in the future working as a researcher – it's a long and unstable career. At the same time, I was spending most of my spare time learning how to make games. After some hesitation, I applied for a position as physics software engineer at EA in Guildford, UK. During three happy years I enjoyed working for multiple triple-A titles within the Frostbite Physics team and learning the ropes of robust, high-performance, high-quality, and scalable C++ code. In the last two years I've been a game programmer in Ustwo games, where I'm collaborating with amazing creative humans.
What does the role involve?
A physics software engineer or physics game programmer, is a programmer that specialises in physics. A big chunk of what physics means for games is collisions between game objects. By using physics laws to control the collisions, we can get a level of fidelity with real life that makes the game world believable. Without physics, or with low-detail physics, the game world breaks, and thus player immersion. A common example of this is ‘clipping', eg when a character limb goes unimpeded through an apparently solid wall. Apart from collision, other game systems also fall into physics, such as water, wind, cloth, ballistics, destruction, etc.
As physics software engineer, you mainly work in three different types of problems. One is to design and implement simulations of physical situations that provide the maximum level of realism allowed by the CPU budget allocated for the game. This is high-efficiency and high-quality code that will be executed at runtime. For example, collisions between characters that hit each other (FIFA, or NFL), or buoyancy and water wave simulation (Battlefield series).
You also design and implement workflows for designers and technical artists so they can create offline assets that are consumed by the physics simulation at runtime. This usually involves some high-level language like C# and UX. Most common example is the workflow for creating cloth for character suits and character hair.
Physics software engineers are also best suited to fix physics bugs, eg when framerate drops as certain objects collide, or when a character is falling through the ground in certain area. In this situation, you often become a consultant for an external team, working closely with them to solve the problem.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
One of the responsibilities that I enjoyed the most in EA was supporting the character physics of Mass Effect: Andromeda. There was a specialised team for character physics in BioWare Montreal. They fully designed, tested, and extended the character movement system. But sometimes a low-level physics bug appeared or the character would behave incorrectly in a normal situation or the frame rate would drop in certain scenarios. That's when I could help the most.
The routine was: get a description of the problem with steps to reproduce it (or a record of the physical simulation to analyse); reproduce the problem myself; analyse the physical simulation step by step, sometimes painfully stepping frame by frame with the debugger, very rarely having to actually print floats in the standard output or a file for later analysis; construct in my mind a model of the situation that produces the bug and test if it's correct; come out with a solution to the problem and test that it actually fixes the bug; intensively test the fix (with the help of external QA teams) to make sure it doesn't introduce new bugs somewhere else; explain inners of the problem and the solution to the BioWare team so they can take the fix home.
This experience was very rewarding because you get challenged with difficult and obscure problems, but also because you get to tightly collaborate with amazing people in many different game projects.
Writer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Charlene Putney: I have a Masters degree in Near Eastern Languages, and ended up working in Google after university. After four years there, I ended up in Facebook on the product team. I worked in Facebook for three years, before leaving in 2013 to write a fantasy novel. I moved into the games world from there, and have been with Larian Studios for three years now.
What does the role involve? Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
A little bit of everything! Depending on the day, I write core story, create characters, design scenarios, write dialogues… and an infinity of other things, including item tooltips, skill descriptions, marketing content, and liaising with all departments to ensure we are all on the same page.
Technical director
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
My Name is Sean Davies. I was a big gamer as a kid but I never really considered it as a career till about the last year of university. We had a Quake LAN in our student house and I found myself spending a lot of my time writing little mods to amuse my housemates – I got a bit addicted
My first industry Job was junior programmer at Gremlin in Sheffield (England) in 1999, working on franchises like Men in Black and Superman. I was then one of four programmers in the original 12 staff at Sumo Digital in 2003. We did a lot of work for Sega (Outrun 2, Virtua Tennis 3, Sonic, and Sega All Stars Racing). My first job as technical director was LittleBigPlanet 3. I'm now working at Rare on Sea of Thieves and whatever comes next
What does the role involve?
Technical director is a fairly new role in the industry so individual companies have their own requirements, but broadly it's a higher level, more business-focused version of the lead programmer role.
I still do some hands on programming but the meat of my job is in meeting with other members of the leadership team from, for example, design, art, marketing, and production to decide on the overall direction for the game and then make sure that that direction is communicated clearly to the programming team.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
There are often decisions which make absolute sense from a full company perspective which look like bad or stupid decisions from the point of view of a single team. That tends to mean that individual tasks get done in ways which don't help towards the overall goal. My job is to do my best to anticipate where these issues might occur and talk to the engineers involved to make sure they understand the requirements from everywhere else in the business that their work will affect. This helps them to make the right decisions at implementation time and means that we don't end up with wasted work or disagreements between the departments and the overall product is of the highest possible quality.
Lead social media manager
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Grace Carroll: My first job was actually in music and entertainment journalism, and at the time I didn't even know that social media managers existed! I thought all ‘games industry jobs' were for programmers and involved a lot of coding, and I'd never managed to get to grips with anything close to the skills needed for that. I was managing the social media for a couple of the websites I wrote for and wondering what I wanted to do in the future when I started watching Rooster Teeth videos. That's how I found out about Barbara Dunkelman, who was the social media manager at the time. It opened up my eyes to the industry and the fact there could be a place for me and that I could combine my current skills with my passion for games.
Following this realisation, I applied for a community manager job at Jagex – and I got it! I worked on the now-defunct Transformers Universe game before briefly spending some time at an agency to improve my social media skills. When the job came up at Creative Assembly, it seemed ideal – and I was lucky enough to get it. All in all, I now have about three years' experience in the games industry, and about five or six in social media and community management. In fact, I've recently been promoted to lead social media manager, taking on the responsibility of team management.
What does the role involve?
A lot! One of the reasons I love it is because it encompasses so much – but that also means it can be hard to describe. There's the basic every day activities of updating our social media platforms, which involves looking at all of the planned Total War activity, curating our communications in line with our Total War tone of voice, strategising on timings and additional supporting assets like artwork or videos. I attend events, and I also spend a lot of time listening to the community, engaging with their feedback and making sure this goes back to our development teams. I come up with long and short term strategies, keep up to date on what else is happening in both social media and games industry news, and as a lead, I also manage the rest of my team and make sure we all know what's going on with each other.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
One of the things I enjoy most that I'm responsible for is setting the tone and style of the Total War social media presence. We have a fantastic community that's really fun to engage with and having that responsibility is not only huge, but something that's always interesting and keeps me on my toes.
Senior services engineer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
I'm Oli Wilkinson, I work at Rare as a senior services engineer, where I've been for the past two years. As you may know, we just shipped Sea of Thieves, so it's an exciting time for us due to our game being played by real players.
Previously to that I worked at Ubisoft, Rare (yes, I went back!) and Lionhead. In total I have six years of professional gamedev experience (joined the biz in 2012), but I've been a professional programmer since 2003/4. My focus and specialism has shifted significantly throughout my career.
Before that, I was a hobby game programmer all through my teens and early 20s. I'm entirely self taught; although I did go to Uni – I studied business and IT project management!
What does the role involve?
My role involves writing low level infrastructure code (storage libraries, networking libraries, security & authentication, etc) and turning them into gameplay-facing cloud services to support player experiences outside of the game. Most of this code is written in C# and hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform. In addition to writing these services, I also integrate them into the game which involves providing SDK-like APIs in C++ for Unreal 4.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
In terms of things I'm specifically responsible for, you'll see my hand in a lot of things that people never really notice until they go wrong. Examples include: online authentication with Sea of Thieves, matchmaking, commerce & store systems, configuration, build & deployment systems for the game, etc. As my job is primarily in online, the role has shifted into a different gear now we have real players, so lately it's dealing with things to optimise the player experience – improving performance of systems, optimising storage and generally keeping things running tip top.
I love my job and the work we do; like I said, you often don't see my work until something ‘goes wrong', so I really enjoy keeping things running smoothly for our players – if they're not having problems about things I have a hand in, I feel good about that.
I often refer to my role as something analogous to tools crossed with engine crossed with operations. We're low level, we're in the background, but the game wouldn't be the same without the stuff we do. The real challenge comes into the role when you launch, all the guesses and assumptions are all tested with millions of players. It certainly keeps you on your toes!
Marketing manager
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
I'm Haley Uyrus, the marketing manager at Failbetter Games. In a previous life I was a graphic designer in the States for big companies like Hasbro and Staples.
Knowing I wanted to switch into an industry with more narrative, and a job where people were happy to come to work each day, I decided to do an MA in Game Design & Theory at Brunel University. I tried and failed at getting my first game job in the four months the UK gives foreign students to find placement with fewer visa restrictions. I was doing a lot of 2D freelance projects for some of our professors like Tanya Krzywinska and Steve Jackson (the one who worked with Ian Livingstone and Peter Molyneux).
I then had to go back to America for a time but was still entirely determined to work in the UK games industry as it had a much nicer community feel than the US one. I went back to the UK to get an MBA in Creative Industries Management, and combined my marketing skills from my previous graphic design jobs to learn more about business – of course, with a games focus. At this time I was also a QA and production intern for Mediatonic.
The second time around I was more prepared for what game companies were looking for and managed to get a job as a marketing manager at BeefJack Promote, a small company that did marketing and PR for indies – they also had their own game studio branch so sometimes I got to help with the writing and design. It was a small company and so I also did all sorts of other roles like business development and even finance for a time.
When I felt I needed to move on to learn more, I was extremely elated to receive a job offer from Failbetter Games.
What does the role involve?
At an indie studio? Everything. In triple-A they'd have marketing and PR as separate roles – departments even. For Failbetter, my role comprises of marketing strategy, PR, social media, event management, advertising, community management, and even using my graphic design skills to art direct trailers and to create all our marketing assets.
Marketing is essentially doing a lot of research and testing to make sure you know the most efficient way to make the right people (the people who are going to buy your game) see that your product exists. In a crowded and still growing market, that means working from conception to launch and even post launch.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
In the beginning stages I do market research, competitor analysis, product analysis and identify who's our right audience and where they exist. I check and make sure our price is the right fit, that our name is Google-able and not taken by another game or even product in another industry.
From there, a marketing strategy can be laid out along with campaign plans for different stages (announcement, preview, review, post-launch etc). Concurrently, I work to grow our community and keep those who have joined interested in our progress. I also create and implement paid advertising campaigns, social and fan competitions, and host development blogs on Twitch.
Each game is different, and it's important to keep up to date with current industry trends and the market itself (imagine how much my job has changed since Steam Greenlight was done away with!).
Software engineer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Blaine Hodge, formerly worked in the triple-A game industry, now indie and VR/AR developer. Worked at EA and Rockstar, NBA Live 2003, March Madness, Bully, and some time on Skate.
What does the role involve?
Software engineer involves building the tech that goes into the game and is used by other developers on the team. So rendering, physics, etc, including tools used by artists.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
One (favourite) specific example was building the AI systems that allowed characters to have snowball fight in Bully. So running around behind cover and throwing snowballs at each other.
Build engineer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Ross McKinley: I'm a software engineer from Dublin, Ireland. Making games was always an interest of mine, but I'm not involved in the creative process. I started off engineering as an intern in at IBM at 23, which is when I got into build engineering, and looking into optimising how the organisation works. Then I moved to DIGIT Gaming at 25 where I designed and built a continuous release pipeline for the ambitious project they're working on, and was involved in designing and building and running a reliable global network of servers for a MMO mobile game. That's when I moved to EA Dice, where I am now, to work on Star Wars and the next games that Dice has in the pipeline. I'm still in the build engineering space, although I'm a fair deal more senior now.
What does the role involve?
The role of the build engineer is to enable the rest of the company to make the product. You're responsible for shipping the product to players, as well as getting different versions of the game to each of the stakeholders inside the company: testers, developers, creatives, outsourcing companies. Usually you're someone who views the world as a series of interconnected systems. You have a radical impact on the effectiveness and productivity of the entire company.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
There are a lot of different responsibilities involved with being a build engineer. Your primary goals are to enable the game team to produce builds. Those builds are then given to other developers and creatives, QA, automated testing, producers and executives, internal play tests, external events, and eventually into the hands of players.
The secondary goal is to do all of this as fast as possible and in a reliable way: if the build breaks because anyone has introduced a bug, the systems that the build engineer(s) build should quickly identify when and where that bug was introduced. The third goal is then to analyse the workflow of every team, and to optimise that. A build engineer has the unique visibility of how every other team interacts, and a responsibility to reduce the friction there as much as possible. Build engineers are force multipliers for the rest of the production team. If we can save five minutes from some process that everyone does a couple times per day that can quickly add up to thousands of hours of productivity saved.
It's normally the build engineer who makes sure the game is packaged correctly for first parties: Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Steam, and any other providers of a platform – they all have different requirements. Right now, I'm working on a system where every creative or developer can test their changes centrally before pushing them out to the rest of the company. We make a build and give early feedback to the creator so that only validated changes enter the system and get pushed out to the rest of the team. A bad change (what we call a build failure) can stop production for hours or even days before a fix is made, so stopping these changes from entering the system is crucial to the productivity of the entire organisation.
Associate brand manager
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Lori Forder: I've only really been in the games industry for just over a year. Until then I'd worked in television production for just under five years and before that I'd worked in sales for Gamestation for two years. I started as lead community manager at Creative Assembly and ten months later moved over into brand management where I've been for three months.
What does the role involve?
Brand managers are essentially project managing the marketing plans for whichever title they work on. We plan out marketing hits and pull all the various teams together (devs, community, cinematics, PR) to make it all happen. As associate I'm on the lower level of responsibility for that as I learn the role, but I work alongside the senior brand manager to plan and pull hits together, decide on product packaging and feed back on all marketing assets.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
We're pretty much responsible for everything the public see of our game before release, but examples of things I do are write product copy for the Steam page, give feedback and approvals on all videos and images before they go out, plan out trailers with cinematics, design the back of packaging. It's pretty varied.
Junior engine programmer
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Iker Gimenez Bilbao: I'm a junior engine programmer at Ubisoft Barcelona. This is my first professional experience in the industry. I started here as a junior gameplay programmer working on Rainbow Six Siege. When a new project arrived at the studio, I was offered to change departments because the profile on my resumé is closer to that of an engine programmer.
What does the role involve?
As a junior engine programmer, I'm expected to have a wide amount of knowledge about how things work under the hood inside the game. I'm also expected to be able to extend its capabilities and to improve its stability. Major new features are usually handled by senior team members. Other stuff that I have done is update engine middleware, diagnose and fix crashes, and provide support to the other departments.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
One of the more interesting tasks I've done is update and configure the crash handler of our engine. Since we're adding new functionality and changing older parts, new issues arise when other devs use those tools. A good way to centralise and work towards stabilising the engine is to have automated crash reporting. Instead of having to take over another dev's machine to look at a crash, you get sent a snapshot of the program state at the moment of the crash. At Ubisoft, there's more sophisticated tracking and information gathering, such as a screenshot of the engine when it crashes, automated count of occurrences, etc.
Project assistant
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
Nick Taylor: My current job at Ubisoft Reflections is actually my first role in the industry. I spent a few years after my undergraduate degree applying for any job in the industry I could find but in retrospect, didn't really know what I was looking for as I had no experience. In 2017 I graduated with a Masters degree in video game design and production which gave me the benefit of experiencing a studio environment and working on both a mobile title (Nanovault) and an unreleased PlayStation 4 project. From there, I went straight to Ubisoft
What does the role involve?
For the most part, the role involves tasks and responsibilities that facilitate the dev team; focusing on supporting the teams logistical needs – organising meetings, ensuring action points are followed up on etc, but the role also puts me in the position of scrum master. This means conducting daily scrum standup meetings – but also conducting sprint planning, review, retrospectives, and everything involved with them. Finally, on a day to day basis, the role involves monitoring and constant maintenance of the teams backlog tasks and use of Jira to track each persons sprint by sprint progress.
Can you give me a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
One thing I'm responsible for is tracking the workload vs allocation of each individual developer working on my assigned feature from both sprint to sprint, and on a project long basis; allowing for estimations of project deliverables across each discipline and highlighting of dependencies, then communicating that information to senior production.
UI artist
Tell us about yourself and your work history.
I'm Rich Warner and I have been a UI artist, as an official job title, for five years now. My background is in Flash and motion graphics as well as graphic design. I'm a massive gamer so working in the industry is a good fit. I have previously worked in the graphic and web industry and hated it pretty instantly.
What does the role involve?
My job currently sees me build UI concepts for menus/huds based on the game's design and its game design document. There are a lot of other disciplines involved like production/design and mostly code as they have to rig it all up.
It's a role that can be very demanding as it's not as grounded as say an environment artist. I could be tasked to come up with the core wireframe of a menu flow to the full animation of UI elements, so you have to be flexible and good with conversations with the previously mentioned parties. Sometimes explaining to code on their level, yet explaining to production in their terms on what happened with this feature or that feature.
UI relies heavily on compliance and guidelines set by MS/Sony/Nintendo. We have to bear these factors in mind from the start with wireframes to testing so the game will actually be published. This can be how often something flashes on the screen to yield epilepsy concerns to the iconography/imagery used for buttons or controllers. All these factors are well documented, but finding out certain items are of course behind NDAs. Also important is making sure that the layout and designs made are good for multiple languages. But that all fits in the same umbrella.
Can you give us a specific example of what you might be responsible for?
For my skillset in particular, I would spend a lot of time building animated mockups of menu sequences/transitions or design ideas before it goes into full implementation.
[img]https://assets.vg247.com/current//2016/06/lego_star_wars_the_forc..
