If you have a passion for gaming, you have likely thought of tackling the video game industry once or twice. The thing is that there are so many moving parts within the creation of playable games. It beckons the question, “Which aspects of video game creation appeal to you the most?”
We’re here to help you answer that question by settling the game designer vs game developer matter.
A Deep Dive Into Game Design vs Game Development
Video game design and video game development are similar to UX and UI design. You need both to bring your creative vision to life and to deliver an actual game to your target players. But before you can combine both disciplines you need to first understand them.
Game Design
Game design focuses on conceptualizing a game’s rules, challenges, rewards, environments, characters, levels, gameplay mechanics, and plotlines. Essentially, game design is where the player’s experience is born.
Video game designers define what the player can and can’t do and how the game reacts to their actions. Spearheading a game’s creative direction, they ensure that every game element is cohesive and contributes to exceptional playability/engagement.
Game Development
Game design is all about a game’s creative aspects; game development is all about a game’s technical aspects.
Video game developers take a game designer’s concepts and ideas and transform them into a tangible, playable game. They write code, programme features, create graphics and sound effects, and continuously test their games to enhance the user’s experience.
What Is the Difference Between a Game Designer and a Game Developer?
You can begin to see distinctions within the matter of game design vs development. But, in actuality, we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.
So now, we’ll examine the game developer vs designer debate through the lens of responsibilities, skills, and qualifications.
Game Designer: Responsibilities
As you can imagine, game designers have a lot of different responsibilities, including the following:
- Ideating, planning, and detailing every game element that we discussed earlier.
- Compiling a professional concept document, just like a UX designer would create a design brief for their projects.
- Conducting market, competitor, and user research to understand what players do and don’t want from their playing experiences.
- Collaborating with game writers and artists to create scripts and mood boards.
- Working alongside other team members like developers to build a functional, interactive prototype.
- Implementing and optimizing enjoyable game systems.
- Adjusting the game design specifications to adapt to new developments and progressions.
- Ensuring that players have the best possible gameplay experience by using UX design principles.
- Meeting deliverable deadlines.
- Leading collaborative meetings.
- Ensuring the team doesn’t deviate from the budget.
- Working alongside clients to clarify and carry out project goals and objectives.
Game Designer: Skills
It’s safe to say that breaking into the gaming industry as a game designer will involve many tasks and duties. To prepare yourself, you’ll need the skills that we’ve explored below.
- Drawing skills to create and communicate visual ideas.
- A knowledge of game UI design.
- Researching skills to acquire the valuable data that will govern a game’s design.
- A strong understanding of character design, object design, and vehicle design.
- The ability to think like a level designer, being able to ideate and draw architecture, layouts, and maps.
- Verbal and written communication skills to present ideas to clients and other team members.
- Innovative problem-solving skills to deliver great products under strict deadlines and tight budgets.
- An understanding of responsive design and creating games for different platforms.
- A strong knowledge of scripting languages and basic programming concepts.
- An understanding of different types of game mechanics.
- Prototyping skills to test out game concepts and designs.
- Cooperation skills to maximize the strengths of every team member.
- A strong knowledge of mathematical concepts like algebra and linear regression to adjust a game’s system.
- Storytelling skills to help clarify compelling plotlines.
Game Designer: Qualifications
It’s worth noting that you don’t necessarily need a formal degree to become a game designer. You can always leverage resources like books, blogs, YouTube videos, and podcasts. You can then practice game design by working on personal projects and building a portfolio from them.
That said, the gaming industry is incredibly competitive. When you’re up against aspiring game designers with degrees, you run the risk of losing a hiring manager’s attention.
For that reason, we recommend a degree in game design, as well as the following degrees:
- Video Game Art
- Graphic Design
- Computer Science
- Computer Engineering
- Animation
- Multimedia Design
- Mathematics
- Software Engineering
Game Developer: Responsibilities
Time for round two of the game developer vs game designer discussion. We’ll start as we did before: by looking at the responsibilities of your typical game developer.
- Collaborating with game designers and other professionals to govern the overall vision of the game.
- Taking a game’s initial concepts and requirements and transforming them into clean code.
- Designing and developing up-to-par code using programming languages like C++.
- Assessing the code’s quality to maintain consistent, high-quality system performance.
- Improving the design and development of existing code.
- Creating game specifications.
- Troubleshooting design issues and rectifying bugs.
- Animating characters and objects.
- Contributing to the sound design and effects of the game.
- Building the game’s initial base engine.
- Optimizing a game’s performance across multiple different platforms.
- Working within the limitations of the game’s budget and deadlines.
- Attending meetings to discuss the game’s progress and any obstacles.
- Creating a game’s updates and patches post-release.
Game Developer: Skills
Like a game designer, game developers have a lot on their plate during the game development process. That’s why they need the following skills:
- Coding and programming skills to understand and build a game’s systems and mechanics.
- Problem-solving skills to debug code and other technical issues.
- Creative skills to build an immersive, enjoyable game world.
- Cooperation skills to ensure you and your team share the project’s goals and objectives.
- Concentration skills to ensure your code is efficient and error-free.
- A strong understanding of different programming languages and software packages.
- Time management skills to organize your workflows effectively.
- A knowledge of design and animation software.
- A strong knowledge of maths, especially algebra, trigonometry, and geometry.
Game Developer: Qualifications
Similar to game designers, game developers don’t actually need a degree to pursue their careers successfully. There are many gaming companies out there that prioritize skills and experience over formal education.
As you know, if you don’t follow the academic route, you’ll need to conduct your own studies in game development. Undoubtedly, you’ll also need a strong portfolio that showcases your value to your prospective hiring managers.
However, if you want to attain a formal qualification, we recommend researching the following degrees:
- Computer Games Development
- Software Engineering
- Audio Engineering
- Game Design
- Mathematics
- Animation
- Graphic Design
- Computer Science
FAQs
Which is more important, game design or game development?
Game developers can’t create a playable game without the concept from which it initially stems. Game designers can’t make their artistic vision a reality without a developer’s technical prowess. It’s not a matter of which is more important – you need both to design an enjoyable game.
Do game designers do coding?
While game designers would benefit from having coding/programming knowledge, it’s not strictly a must-have skill set. Game designers focus more on the conceptualization of a video game than on its coding.
Can you be both a game designer and a game developer?
If game design and development appeal to you, you can acquire skills and competencies that make you proficient in both. In fact, many indie developers make for talented game designers, as well as game developers.
Game Designer vs Game Developer: Get Inspiration From Page Flows for Any Design
So, you know the answer to, “What is the difference between a game designer and a game developer?” Now, focus on their similarities. Both roles focus on cohesion, engagement, and, most importantly, user-centricity, just like Page Flows.
Page Flows is where you’ll find top-of-the-line curations of annotated user flow recordings and screenshots. By leveraging our inspirational resources, you’ll learn how to master intuitive in-product navigation from dozens of prosperous brands and industries.
We document both web and mobile user flows that are as varied as they are invaluable. From social networking to SaaS, we collect flows from every type of product you could ever build. As an aspiring game designer/developer, you’d especially benefit from our Playhouse and Monument Valley collections.
You now know the game designer vs game developer debate is actually a matter of game designers and game developers. Now, master the matter of seamless navigation and user-centric design with Page Flows. Try Page Flows to start building superior digital products!
