What does a game designer actually do?

I started this blog so I could try and do some good for the mobile gaming industry. When I say good, I don’t mean for the industry itself but for the people in it: the gamers that enjoy playing games and the people that develop games as a passion. There’s literary nothing I can do to help big corporations and players; they have it well figured out in terms of monetization and recurring revenue.

My goal with this blog, in its first stage, was to help gamers understand why the industry is the way it is and how it got here. Whenever I can, I use the trust built with my readers to shine a bit of light towards good games that focus on gameplay and the user’s satisfaction instead of just funneling money from their wallets.

I think I did a pretty good job so far. A few of my articles are ranking well on Google and I’ve received a lot of great feedback from people, both on reddit, twitter and via the feedback widget. Articles like “How Do Free Mobile Games Earn Money“, “What Happens When Mobile Games Shut Down“, “Why Do Mobile Games Use Bots Instead Of Players” and “Why Do Mobile Games Have Fake Ads” have done wonderfully over the past 6 months in terms of KPIs and feedback.

I think it’s time to move the blog to the next stage of its existence – that of inspiring and helping the next generation of designers and developers that will shape the future of the industry – and what better way to do that than removing the curtains and showcasing what exactly it’s like making games. What does a game designer actually do?

Your Answer Up Front

A game designer is an “architect” that prepares, creates, presents and aids in the development of a game. The designer creates the “blueprints” of the game and “answers” all of the questions a team member might have with regards to how the game is developed. He’ll create and maintain documentation, build prototypes, tunes systems, lays out the level design, balance the weapons and write the lore of the game.

In this article we’ll take a look at what exactly a game designer has to do in order to bring games to the market. I’ll talk about WHAT I PERSONALLY do nowadays, how I used to do it when I was employed at various companies (Gameloft, Mobility) and how I handled my approach to game design as an independent game developer. These three different game designer roles require different sets of skills and, in some cases, they find themselves in direct opposition of each other. By the end of the article you’ll hopefully have a better understanding of what exactly a mobile game designer does.

What does it mean to be a Mobile Game Designer?

When I meet people outside of the mobile game industry I often have to explain what a Game Designer is. Some understand the concept but a lot of people just interpret the Designer part of the title and confuse me with a Game Artist or a User Interface Designer. While there is some overlap in a few areas, the job itself has very little to do with graphical artistry.

The best way to describe the job itself is to think of a mobile game designer as an Architect. My job is to explain to the entire team how the game should work, how it behaves, how it controls, what the levels must contain and how they should look like. A game designer, in the most basic of senses, designs the game. Let’s give some examples.

If the game has a main character, the designer must ask: who is the main character? And I’m not talking about the main character’s persona or name. I’m talking more about what he or she is, what makes them special and how the main character defines the game.

• What can the main character do?
  • Can he fly or just jump really high?
  • Can he run?
  • Can the main character wield guns?
    • What guns does the character wield?
      • Can he use swords?
        • Would swords work in a mobile first person shooter?
        • What other first person shooters use melee weapons?
      • Is the main character a sniper?
        • Can we have a fun game where the player only shots long ranged weapons?
        • Can we make it a stealth first person shooter?
          • Do stealth first person shooters actually work in the mobile gaming market?
            • Should we simulate the bullet’s trajectory?
              • Ohhh can we do any x-rays when the bullet impacts the target?
      • Do the weapons use ammo?
        • Do we limit the amount of ammo in the game as a requirement?
          • 5 stars if you use only 10 bullets, 3 stars if you use 15 and you fail if you run out of bullets?
        • Can the main character pick up weapons?
• What must the main character achieve in the game?
  • Is there a final boss the main character has to take down?
  • Is there a storyline I want my main character to go through?
  • Is the main character on the good or bad side of things?
    • Oh it would be really cool to have the main character be a villain or an anti-hero?
      • How would an anti-hero differ from a hero in this game?
        • Do mobile gamers care about this?
• How does the main character control?
  • Do we use a virtual joystick?
  • Do we use the phone’s accelerometer to control the camera?
    • Would casual players like this approach?
  • Can the main character Jump?
    • How far can he jump?
      • Do we allow bunny jumps?
  • How does he change weapons?
    • Do we add a button to toggle between weapons?
    • Can we switch weapons via swipes on the screen?
• What can the player do to the main character?
  • Can the main character die?
    • How can he die?
    • What kills him?
    • Can he regenerate his life?
      • What helps him regenerate?
        • Do we have health picks up?
        • Does his life regenerate while standing still?

The list of questions goes on and on. My job as a Game Designer is to answer all of these questions in a way in which the people working on the game can do their jobs. In this example I talk about how the main character controls, how he moves, interacts with the world and environment.

The programmer can read the answers to the questions and figure out how to implement the control scheme. What buttons are required to be added to the interface? How high should the camera be positioned? What type of collision and navigation is needed? How do the enemies interact with the main character?

The artists can take the details about the main character and bring him to life. They make concept art based on my descriptions. They use the details I give them. If I answer no to the question of “Can the main character jump?” I can ask myself “Why?”. Is it because his legs got damaged in a previous combat scenario and he is using crutches? The artists can run with this or find their own answer to the questions. This helps create the foundation upon which the artists bring life into the character.

However…

A game designer doesn’t just come up with questions and answers for the game. A designer also creates content for the game. The weapons we asked questions about? What are they? How often do they fire? How many clips do they take? Where are they found in the game world?

The artist might create the 3D model for a weapon and a programmer implements it into the game. The designer? The designer places it into the world, tunes and tests it. The amount of ammo the weapon uses? The designer decides that. How long should the reload take? The designer decides that. When does the gun break? You guessed it, the designer.

It’s the same with cars, their speed and their fuel consumption. It’s the same with the enemy’s HP, aim, accuracy, movement speed and their spawn location.

Game Design has many specialties

There are multiple types of game designers. The field itself has grown over the last 40 years and there are a ton of game designers out there. While a generalist game designer touches on most of the fields, some only do a specific subset of game designer, and they do it amazingly well. A few of the many specialties in game design include:

• Level Design
  • The level designer is responsible for how the map, level or section looks and FEELS like. Where buildings go, what buildings go there, where the weapons spawn, when the enemies appear and HOW they engage. Any puzzle, any health kit and waypoint is added by the level designer.
• Economy Design
  • The economy designer handles and tunes the entire backbone of the game: from the speed at which the player progresses through the content, to the damage output and how much in-game currency the player gathers, the economy designer is on top of it all. Balancing, economy, purchases, offers and consumables all are gathered together in his favorite tool (sometimes an Excel spreadsheet) where the designer can get a good overview for tweaking.
• Content Design
  • The content designer is a game designer who focuses on creating the game’s content, story, lore, quests and missions. They are designers with very strong creative writing skills and an affinity towards narrative design.
• Systems Design
  • System designers are responsible for creating and managing the various processes behind a game and how they intertwine with each other. A system is a collection of interactions between elements of a game that work together and can be combined together in an output.
    • As a quick example: You play an RPG and a wolf decides to run after your character. You sprint towards the town. As you reach the town, the guards run and attack the wolf to save you. A nearby mage casts a fireball on the wolf and damages the guards.
    • With the wolf dead the guards now focus on the mage due to the miss-placed fireball that damaged them. For that to happen, there’s a faction relationship and reputation system running in the background.
    • System designers have a lot in common with economy designers but where an economy designer has a macro overview of the game’s economy and simulation, the system designer goes into the nitty gritty individual details.

There are more fields that I haven’t talked about, but these are the main ones. A lot of the remaining ones heavily overlap with the ones presented above since the actual job titles aren’t regulated and the naming conventions vary between companies.

What does it take to be a Game Designer?

Experience. Experience with designing games, systems and experience with analyzing and over analyzing every nitty gritty thing that comes into your mind. Game Design is a vast field and becoming a good game designer requires experience with game design. I know it sounds like a catch-22 but you don’t necessarily need to know how to use a specific set of tools to become one.

There are, however, a few “must-haves” in order to have a chance. You need to understand the terminology and you need to be able to break down any concept into pieces and the pieces themselves into other pieces. Let’s say I want to hire you as a junior game designer.

You’ll walk into my office or we’ll meet at a terrace for tea/coffee/beer and we’ll have a long dialogue. I want to see how your mind works. I’ll ask you questions about the environment we’re in.

• If we’re in the office, I’ll ask you how you would design an office chair race. What would you remove from the office and what would you add? How could we decide winners in a neck-in-neck photo finish? How could we make sure we won’t injure each other? Where do you think the highest chance of an accident can happen?
• If we’re at a pub with a terrace I’d ask you to explain to me why the bottles on the shelfs are placed the way they are. Are the most commonly asked for bottles placed within hand’s reach? Why do you think the TVs on the wall are tuned to different channels and I’d ask you how you would place the tables in such a way that you would create the longest path to the bathroom.

These questions are important for me in order to figure out how your mind works, how you analyze things and how quickly you think on the spot. I’d see how creative you are and see if you can deduce various reasonings that you are not familiar with. I would pay close attention to how you answer and not what you answer. There’s basically no wrong answer to these questions.

An analytical and creative mind is your best friend. The ability to clearly explain what you’re thinking of is extremely important. Your job, especially in the early stages of a game’s inception, is to be as creative and concise as possible. Later on you need to be willing to grind, to create documentation, spreadsheets, wireframes and mockups and have the patience to look for faults in your design and fix them.

An experienced designer is a great designer not because he made so many games, but because I assume he failed a ton of times and learned from the failures. Anyone, given enough time, will make a decent shooting game with a good feel for handling the weapons, but an experienced person will know what pitfalls to avoid from the start. That saves a lot of time and effort.

The best way to become a game designer is to make games and learn from them. I know it sounds weird, but you have to kinda be one to become one. You need the right mindset.

OR

You to start from a specific niche of game design and go from there. If you’re good with 2D or 3D you can start making levels and environments and try to plan encounters and fun things to do in them. You leverage your art skills to kickstart your level design experience. As you work as a level designer you pick up knowledge from the other fields, as level design doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

You write a story and break elements that story into pieces. You have characters and a setting and the story is pretty decent to read. You take pieces of that story (the characters, the setting, the location) and you describe them in more detail. The shop keeper from your story? His name is Jack and his a tall guy. He opened a shop because he got tired of his corporate job where he had to work for 12-16 hours a day. He hates grinding daily on a menial tasks but he loves wood carving so he makes furniture and sells it at his store.

• Now here’s something interesting. Wood carving sounds like a neat topic. How would a wood carving game for mobile look like? How would it work?
• How would his store work as a management game?

You write down even more details about his wood carving passion and see what elements you can use in a game. What if you’d take a block of wood, put it on the phone’s screen and represent it in 3D? What if you could slide your finger over the screen and where the finger overlaps the wooden block, small pieces of it would be removed? Oh and what if you have to shape that block of wood in the form of a chair (let’s say) that he could sell in the store?

I’d want you to take elements form the story and try and make them a mini game. Break them down into pieces and see what you can come up with and when you have all the pieces break them down further. How much time and with what speed would I have to move my finger on the phone’s screen to carve the block of wood? Too little time and I might carve it badly. Too slow and it would be a boring experience. How can I represent that the player has carved for too long? Pop-up on the screen? Sound alert? Phone vibration?

To become a game designer you need to be able to represent your designs and be creative. You need to be able to make me (or someone else) really understand how the game works. The tools you use to do that? Up to you. Google Docs to write things down, Photoshop to create mockups and draw your level layouts. Max and Maya or Blender to create scenes and 3D aids. Unity 3D to design a prototype of your game. It’s up to you.

When I started out as a game design I’d use OpenOffice (an open source office suit like Microsoft Office) to describe my designs, I’d use Paint.NET for my concepts and layouts and I’d program quick prototypes to showcase the principles of my idea. I wasn’t a really good writer and I noticed early on that people wouldn’t understand properly what I wanted them to understand. So instead of writing more, I decided to just “show them what I mean”. And I picked up programming that way which is an added bonus (that we’ll talk about in another article).

What does a <mobile> game designer actually do?

Game Designers and their tasks and assignments vary greatly. What I did as a Game Designer when I was working at Gameloft is completely different than what I did as a Game Designer at Mobility (a Disney partner that worked on Frozen: Free Fall) and totally different than what I do today for my clients. I’ll give you three examples of what I used to do and what I do as a game designer nowadays.

I’ll split it up into three categories and walk you through some of the things that I did on a day-to-day basis. The most common tasks and assignments I handled; we’re not going to talk about the extraordinary cases.

• Mobile Game Designer
  I worked as a Game Designer for different studios over the years. I’ll go with Gameloft and Mobility-Games as they are the most known(-ish).
  • At Gameloft one of the titles I worked on was NOVA 3, a premium first person shooter. It was my first “official” game designer job in this industry and this all happened in 2010. My tasks while there included:
    • Doing Level Design for the game. I was in charge of two levels from N.O.V.A 3, the first two space ship levels (Therrius 1 & 2). I created the level layout, placed the enemy spawn location, placed waypoints, missions descriptions and objectives. I even created puzzle sequences for the game play, like first person platforming puzzles.
    • I tuned enemy AIs, their abilities, their fire rate, spawn intervals and created “interesting” situations for the player to end up in. Like when enemy spiders crawl from a vent and down the walls towards the player. Vents in which the player has to go through in order to bypass a blocked door.
    • I lip-synced the conversation between the characters in a cinematic. It was the scene where Kal ends up in space and is saved by Maz’rah. There we many hours of adjusting the lips to somehow-kinda match the audio files. And the text on-screen.

• • I scripted player interactions with environmental objects (lua) and triggered a lot of cinematics and animations by hand.
    • I prototyped the weird “train shootout” on space trains inside of corridors on Therrius 2.
  • At Mobility I was a Game and Level designer for a match-3 game based on the Frozen IP. For a few years I:
    • Designed levels for game. Hundreds of levels, with different shapes and objectives. Hundreds of levels.
    • Designed new mechanics and tiles with different behaviors.
    • Placed the levels on a map and linked the nodes together.
    • Played each level hundred of times in order to balance it. I wanted to make sure that players can win the level between 1 and 25% of the times. Hundreds of playthroughs per level with hundred of levels. You do the math on how much time was spent inputting data into spreadsheets :).
    • Helped design tools that would make the level creation process easier.
    • Helped design and create new User Interfaces for the game.
    • Wrote tons of pages of design documents explaining how tile interactions work and what could we do with them in the future.
• Mobile Game Designer
  • I currently have a list of clients and studios that I worked with. I don’t work on a single title anymore, but on multiple titles. On some of them I design the actual games from the ground up and I have full creative control of them (these tend to be smaller mobile games like casino and puzzle games). In other situations I do a lot of level design and system design.
  • On the games that I design from the ground up for clients:
    • I write down the overview of the game
      • What the game is about
      • What the rules are
      • What the player does
      • How monetization works
      • How much content is there
    • break down the game’s control scheme and describe in detail how the player interacts with the game
    • describe in detail how the game works, how the player navigates through the game, what the scenes are
    • create wireframe mockups for most of the game’s screen
    • break down the assets needed (buttons, graphics, 3D Models, sound assets, animations)
    • explain what’s needed for the MVP (minimum viable prototype), what the full game requires and what can be used and done during LiveOPS (post-game release).

For most projects that I work on from the ground up I initially spend most of my time working with Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. I do most of my graphical design using GIMP (a 2D open source alternative to Photoshop). I use EasyMockup (Mac App) to do my wireframe design (personal preference here, you can use what ever you want). I also use Unity to prototype and test mechanics and use the prototype to answer design questions I’m not sure about.

These are the tools I consistently used through my career: An office suite, a paint package and a way to create and test prototypes. On the latter, sometimes I used in-house tools from the company I was working for, in other cases I used a game engine like Unity or LOVE or Irrlicht or anything that I could get my hands on. There have been times when I modded an existing game just to test a level design concept I had.

Frequently Asked Questions about mobile game design

What is a typical day for a game designer?

Talking from my experience? If it’s not a game I’m passionately invested in I normally treat it like a regular 9-to-5 job. I wake up in the morning, brush my teeth and read up on what happened in the gaming industry, twitter, reddit, GameDeveloper.com. After that I go to work.

I have both a home office and a regular office where I work from. Depending on my mood, I either work from home or commute to my office. In the morning and until launch I attend online meetings, answer emails and plan the priorities of my tasks. After launch I turn off most of my social networks and begin the daily grind. I usually work till 6 or 7 PM. I then usually head over to a pub and meet up with other friends from the industry or spend time with my girlfriend, watching movies or playing with my cats.

On projects that I’m extremely passionate about? I sometimes spend 18-32 hours working non-stop on them. This has become increasingly rarely in recent years but in the early to mid 2010’s when my energy felt like it could never run out? I went 72 hours in a non-stop work session so I can finish up a game and release it. I then slept through the entire release and woke up two days later.

Nowadays I’m more tempered and plan my game’s development better. In the past 3 years I probably only did 2-3 stints of overtime and most of them were less than 3-4 hours of overtime. I try to keep a balanced work-life.

How many hours a day does a game designer work?

Normally you work as much as you need to get the job done with the usual 9 to 5 schedule applying. However, the games industry is known for brutal work schedules and it’s common to see game devs (designers included) working 60 to 80 hours/week nearing a game’s release.

Do video game designers work from home?

Some do, especially post 2020 when remote work became a necessity. There are few reasons why a game designer should be in the office and most of the work can be done remotely. A lot of game designers now do their jobs remotely, interacting with the team via online tools (Zoom, Skype, Teams).

Do game designers need to code?

It’s not a requirement, but knowing how to program can be an extremely useful tool for a game designer. It helps you explain how the game and mechanics work, especially to the programming team. It helps you spot possible architectural problems and it can stop you from making expensive mistakes in your design (like designing a system that sends millions of request to a database every hour).

Programming can also help you prototype your design and get better insight on what you’re trying to achieve. It also helps you tune the game better, being able to go into the code and extract the data you need or make small changes to the game’s code. Programming is a useful tool in a game designer’s arsenal, but it’s not required.

Is it hard to be a game designer?

It depends on the amount of experience and failures you have under your belt. It’s hard when you’re starting out and you don’t know WHAT YOU DON’T know. As you ship (or fail to ship) more games you acquire experience and knowledge and, over the years, you know decisions and designs to avoid. Your life gets easier and easier as you accumulate more knowledge.

Can I become a game designer without a degree?

I don’t have a degree in game design. I have an IT & Economics degree but I started out making games before even being in high-school and got my first official job as a game designer before getting my degree. A lot of companies hire based on experience and portfolio, not based on a degree.

Is game designer a good career?

For me, it’s an amazing career. I designed and interacted with so many different projects and made friends all around the globe. It opened up a ton of possibilities, had me visit a lot of amazing countries and make life-long friendships with people from the industry. I got letters from fans, gave interviews in the press and I rarely had days with no food on the table.

However, it’s also a stressful career, especially in the beginning. Salaries tend to be, on average, less than other IT careers, especially less than in programming and sometimes in the art-related gaming fields. However, with a good portfolio and enough experience (and a dash of luck) you can end up in a good position career-wise.

It’s an amazingly fulfilling career though.

Can game designers become rich?

I hope so. Technically speaking there are some very very very rich game designers out there that have mansions built out of yachts. There are also starving indies on the other side of the spectrum. Becoming rich from just straight daily grinding your job and pumping out game design documents and concepts? Small chance. But, you might get lucky, end up in a good position and have a game succeed. In a small team, that success can feed you for years and allow quite a lot of luxuries.

I wouldn’t count on it and wouldn’t start planning with becoming rich in mind. There are a lot of game designers who specifically choose to move (or stay) in low-cost countries while doing projects and working for companies or clients from high cost areas. Imagine getting San Francisco salaries while living in Moldova where the average salary is around $200.

Does Mobile Game Design require a different set of skills than normal Game Design?

Not necessarily a different set of skills, just different experience and approach to design. You won’t design a mobile shooter like a PC shooter and require the player connect a mouse to his iPhone to play the game while on the bus.

A mobile game designer needs to understand the medium he is working on, how people interact with it and what can and cannot (or shouldn’t) be done with mobile games. He also needs to understand the monetization differences in this medium as well as SOME technical limitations.

There is much more overlap between the skills a mobile and regular game designers have in common than differences.

Where To Next?

This was the first article in my series on what it’s like to be in the, mobile, gaming industry. Like I mentioned in the beginning of the article, I plan to release more content that can help you peer behind the curtains.

Second article in the series is live! Read about the differences 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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