Sunday 18 October 2009

Job roles in the industry.

There are many job roles in the games industry as we found out in last weeks lecture with kelly. There are jobs such as art designer, lead art designer, level designer, sound production, executive producer, producer, the list goes on and on...

After playing Uncharted 2 Among Thieves earlier today (which is awesome btw ^-^) I noticed when I connected online for the multiplayer a banner advertising career opportunities in Naughty Dog so I thought I'd check it out for this homework.

I thought I'd look at the "Game Designer" career opening as it's the path I'd most like to go down.

Responsibilities

  • Responsible for the planning, layout, setup, and tuning of game levels
  • Responsible for designing and producing engaging and fun third-person action gameplay and levels
  • Act as producer for levels you design, as well as other parts of the game, collaborating across disciplines to get work done and clear dependencies, ensuring deadlines are met, and championing aspects of the gameplay
  • Work directly with artists, programmers, animators and other game designers to contribute to the vision of the game
  • Responsible for level layout by creating simplified level geometry and performing extensive play-testing and iteration
  • Work with programmers to develop tools on an ongoing basis

So after looking at these responsibilities it's clear the games designers need to have a knowledge of all aspects involved in the making of games in order to make sure the design process runs smoothly and goes the way they want it to, ensuring their vision is fulfilled.


Requirements & Skills

  • Experience designing levels for console games
  • Minimum 3 to 5 years of games industry experience
  • Strong methodology and problem solving ability and with a focus on creative, fun and innovative solutions
  • Strong and effective communication skills
  • Exceptional team player with the ability to collaborate without losing sight of the gameplay vision
  • Willingness to take design direction when offered
  • Experience playing 3rd person action games
  • Very good working knowledge of Maya, 3DS Max or similar 3D package
  • Experience of developing third-person action games a bonus
  • Experience of scripting set-up for action games a bonus
  • Desire to be a part of the Naughty Dog team

The list of skills and requirements needed for the job proves that the games designer needs to have a good amount of knowledge in all aspects of the industry and job roles. From what I gather after last session and just researching the role of games designer, they basically come up with the premise of games, the story, characters, basic premise for the levels and the overall direction for the game including the decision of the genre of the game for example FPS, RTS, Puzzler and so on.

They would have to keep in constant communication with other departments in order to make sure that the designing progress is running parallel with their designs.

1 comment:

  1. ooh and the source for the repsonsibilities and the skills & requirements was the official Naughty Dog website. Want to avoid that darn plagarism right ?

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