Do game designers need to code? Find out why!

A few years ago I used to teach a Game Design course at an academy in Bucharest as well as host Game Design & Development workshops at various events. Students were usually shocked when I mentioned that I like to design and develop my own prototypes and they would always ask me this question: Do game designers need to code? Is programming important for a Game Designer?

Your Answer Upfront:

Programming isn’t a requirement for Game Designers but it is a useful tool that can help them deliver a better game. Game Designers who can program and prototype mechanics by themselves can speed up a game’s development and deliver more clear and concise designs by being able to validate their ideas or explain them in a more logical manner to the development team.

In this article we’ll take a look at what skills are a must have for a game designer. We’re also going to explain why programming (or coding) isn’t necessarily a MUST HAVE but I’ll give you specific examples on why I recommend it and how it helped me through my career. By the end of this article you should have a pretty good idea if Game Designers Need To Code.

What is Game Design?

I covered the topic of Game Design in our last two articles. There’s this article on “What a Game Designer Does At His Job” and there’s another article on “The Difference Between Game Design and Game Development“. I recommend reading the two articles for more clarification. However, here’s the short version.

Game Design is a continuous creative process during which an idea is developed, refined, tested and validated. The end goal of the game design process is to establish the rules, the aesthetics, the elements and mechanics of an end product that can be played and enjoyed by the target audience (gamers).

What Skills Are A Must Have For A Game Designer?

A game designer is an architect that creates the blueprints for a game that is to be developed. A good architect isn’t just a good artist, just as a Game Designer isn’t only good at designing by writing design documents. A really good Game Designer should have AT LEAST SOME knowledge in the various fields of Game Development.

The most useful skills for a designer are:

• The ability to be an effective communicator
  • Hands down this is one of the best and most required skills of all. You need to be able to explain with depth and detail what the game should be about. You have to be able to do this as efficiently as possible. Every other skill in your arsenal is second to this.
    
    If you cannot communicate clearly what you want to achieve, the end result (the game) is going to suffer at worst and, at best, the entire development process is going to be hindered with development time increasing exponentially.
• Problem Solving
  • Game Development is literary a puzzle game in which many people come together to solve the task at hand. How does the main character fight? What is this game about? How do you finish the level? How many enemies are there? When does the player die? How do we make this game fun? How can we make the player fight against 200 enemies at once without running into performance issues?
    
    The ability to look at a challenge (or problem) and come up with creative or technical solutions is your best friend. Limitations, challenges or problems that arise during development are not your enemy. You can leverage them to shape the design of your game. As such problem solving is an important skill you need to acquire.
• Decision Making and Knowing When The Result Is Good Enough
  • Good Designers come up with amazing ideas. Great Designers ship. I personally know a ton of amazingly creative designers that cannot ship a game to save their studio. They’re perfectionists who are never 100% satisfied and they hammer at a problem for months and years at end. Sadly in most cases when their game finally shipped their efforts were lost in the sea of releases.
    
    You need to be able to say “This is as good as I can get it to be” and deliver the specs, design or requirements to the team. In the words of the amazing Jeff Vogel (Spiderweb Software): “If I double my development time will I double my revenue?“. From my own experience? This is rarely the case.
    
    If you want to be a great game designer you’ll need to be able to know when to work on an idea and when to cut it out of your game. Don’t be married to your ideas, be merciless with them.

What Skills Are Helpful For A Game Designer?

• Creativity
  • Note that creativity isn’t on my must have list. I know a ton of designers who aren’t very creative by default but can deliver really good ideas and gameplay concepts. They do this by analyzing and breaking down existing concepts and mechanics used in games they played. Their design and creatives ideas come from experience.
    
    But as far as creativity goes, it’s a useful and helpful skill to have, it saves on time reduces the barrier to entry as far as experience goes.
    
• Knowledge with tools used in the industry
  • Art tools like Photoshop, Maya, 3D Studio Max are an incredible asset that can aid you visually express and communicate your designs. Why write 200 pages explaining how the environment should look like when you can deliver a mockup or concept art of the environment with your design document? A picture is worth a 1000 words and in this case it’s 100% true.
  • Development Tools – working with level editors, paint programs, spreadsheets and build environments. Imagine you want to change a fight sequence in a given level. What’s the best way to do it?
    • Ask someone else to go and edit that level, wait until they get to it and then check it yourself in the next build?
    • Go into the level, update it yourself and instantly validate your change?
      
  • Programming Languages and Tools.
    • No, I’m not saying you should be an assembly programmer or a C/C++ expert. Knowing how to read the code your team develops helps you figure out weird behaviors and HOW TO LEVERAGE THEM. It can also help you explain to your programmers and developers HOW TO MORE EASILY BRING YOUR DESIGNS TO LIFE.
      
    • Understanding how programming works can help you make better designs. Understanding the limitations of a programming language or platform can help you avoid making really bad design decisions.
      
    • Let me give you an example on how knowing how to code helped me back in my Gameloft days. I was working on a gameplay sequence on the Therrius Space Ship where the player would sit on a moving train-like platform in a race, chase and kill sequence against many enemies. We did not have support for such platforms in the engine at that point and the team did not know if it was worth risking and wasting time to implement that and have it not be a fun (or good enough) gameplay sequence. What did I do?
      
      I developed a quick in-engine prototype for the sequence myself. I prototyped the gameplay I wanted inside the game by keeping the player static on a box and by moving a gray-boxed tunnel around the player while spawning enemies on other boxes and moving them towards the player.
      
      It only took me a few hours to prototype and by the end of the day the producer green-lit the mechanic for implementation. Check out a video of that gameplay section:

• Analytical Skills
  • Being able to look at a data set and understanding what to do with it is extremely important. Knowing how to create a heatmap of the player’s way through a level and knowing how to update that level is a good ability to own and incredibly useful.
    
    RIOT Games (League of Legends) constantly keep updated graphs of what path through the main level players take, where they unleash their ultimate abilities and where the most common deaths take place. Why? Because they can update their level design and balancing thanks to that data.
    
    Analytical skills are important. They’re not critical and usually they’re mostly taken into battle by specialized designers (like System or Economy Designers) however, just grasping the basics can give you a good edge in the industry.

Any other skills (like storytelling, dialogue writing, machine learning or being able to find Waldo) are useful and aid, but are not necessarily required and won’t have as much as a GENERAL IMPACT as the ones mentioned above.

Do Game Designers Need To Code?

Programming isn’t a requirement for Game Designers but it is a useful tool that can help them deliver a better game. Game Designers who can program and prototype mechanics by themselves can speed up a game’s development and deliver more clear and concise designs by being able to validate their ideas or explain them in a more logical manner to the development team.

Why wait for weeks for a programmer to implement your “idea” only to discover that it’s no fun when you can quickly do it yourself? Programming saves you time and keeps your sanity. Also may help manage your relationship with the programming team.

Knowing How To Program Helped My Game Design Career

I started making games back in 2006. When I started out there were no engines or tools that I could use to design a game, at least none that were affordable (Unreal Engine 3 required an upfront budget of a few thousand dollars to use) and even if I could afford them I still needed to know how to work with (aka program) them. I grabbed a copy of Dark Basic (a basic programming language with DirectX bindings) and started making my own games with it.

It took me months before I could make the simplest of games and prototypes but once I could I started building up a portfolio of small games. I also learned a ton of caveats when it came to implementing design behaviors for AI’s. In a year or so I already had 3 or 4 little games under my belt.

I programmed my way into Game Design @ Gameloft

In 2010 I moved to Bucharest and immediately walked into Gameloft’s offices and applied for a job there as a Game Designer. The company sent me a test to design a level for first person shooter with some caveats and limitations in mind (no cover mechanics, futuristic environments, etc.). I wanted to job badly so I didn’t limit myself to just making a quick design document. I went as far as making a 3D Level and implementing a first person shooter camera.

I submitted my test in the form of an executable that contained the level design of the level and you could fly through it. At various points there would be prompts explaining what would happen at that point in the level, where enemies would come from and what the player must do. It wasn’t a full First Person Shooter, just a 3D Map Viewer that I quickly put together but it was enough to land me the job.

The Creative Director saw that I grasped basic concepts of level design, that I had technical skills and that I could deliver and ship something in the two or three days since I got the assignment. And I got the job, my first job in the industry as a professional game designer.

My first indie game release was the result of a Game Jam prototype I did

Sometime in 2012 I joined a game jam and I teamed up with an amazing artist called Thomas Noppers. He was an artist and I was a game designer who knew how to code. Together we made a Roguelike vampire hunting game stylishly titled “Pimps vs Vampires” (video bellow). A few weeks after the game jam ended we finished developing the game and released it as an indie title (and my first commercial indie game release).

I updated the level editor I was using daily at Mobility Games in order to easily make levels for Frozen Free Fall

When I was designing levels for Frozen: Free Fall, I was working with an in-house level editor. A programmer from the team taught me how to program using Unity and C# (thank you Patrick) and I upgraded the tools I was using in order to make levels even faster. The tiles and pieces would update their states in the editor, instead of having to lose time to check them in the log or in the inspector. I also quickly made a procedural level generator to create as many level shapes as possible.

I would start the day by letting the level generator create 10-20 interesting level shapes for the match-3 game while I was drinking my coffee. When I came back to my desk I would check the generated levels and pick a few of them that I could tweak and turn into proper match-3 levels that looked interesting.

I designed and prototyped my most successful game as a Solo Developer

One of the biggest successes of my careers was an article that appeared in Forbes Magazine about an indie game that I developed. That game was fully designed, validated and implemented by me with little to no outside help. Had I not known how to program I wouldn’t have been able to release that game.

If you’re curious about the Forbes article, you can read it here.

Where To Next?

This is the third article in my series of articles about being a Game Designer in the Mobile Gaming Industry. You can read the other articles in this series:

• What Does A Game Designer Actually Do
• What Is The Difference Between Game Design and Game Development

I write extensively about the mobile gaming industry, their tactics and how greed influences a game’s design. I believe that you might be interested in more articles about the mobile gaming industry. So if you want to stick around, you can check out “What’s the difference between Fremium, Free To Play and Pay 2 Play“, “Why Voodoo Games Are Popular” and “Why Do Mobile Games Take So Much Space“.

There’s also a monster post (about 4000 words) that answers the question: “How Hard Is It To Make A Mobile Game“. It goes in depth with actual examples on how Experience, Resources and Financials affect the difficulty of developing and releasing new mobile games!

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