A few questions I have fielded recently in conversation can be distilled down to one question.

"What are the typical roles and responsibilities people hold within the games industry?"

I think it's an important question. One that in particular, people studying games courses should be asking, and then asking themselves where they think they're going to fit in.

I am still surprised, even though it seems to happen all the time, when I talk to people in their last year of games related study that they do not yet have a feeling for the kind of role they want to take up in industry.

I am surprised because I think it is important to know what you want to do so you can focus on breaking down the steps to achieving it. It is also realistic. Most people, and I say most people, myself included, are not good at everything. If you want land work in a competitive, highly engaged workforce you need to put your best foot forward and present your strongest skills and develop them.

To that end here are some of the common roles in the industry. These roles almost always exist on a development team of any size. The only thing that changes is if there are individuals dedicated to the role. On a large team you may have multiple people in these roles, and probably highly specialised people at that. On a small team, you're just going to get people wearing many hats.

Administrative/Business

  • Studio Head
  • Producer
  • Associate Producer
  • Other

Art

  • Art Director
  • Lead Artist
  • Animator
  • Rigger
  • Technical Artist
  • 3D Artist
  • 2D Artist

Design

Lead Designer

Programming

  • Lead Programmer. Grizzled veterans that often have a further specialisation but they take on a mentorship role, subsystem and game software architecture, algorithmic design, coding standards, time estimate collation and often the more thorny programming task.
  • Gameplay Programmers. They create the rules of the game using tools and subsystems that other programmers build for them.
  • Graphics Programmers. They take the assets that the artists create and decide what to display on the screen each frame, as well as what and how to apply effects.
  • Network Programmers. They are primarily responsible for the sending and receiving of data online. Their primary skill lies on the creation of systems that can allow for latency and still work.
  • Server Programmers. Very similar to network programmers, but more about scale and how to handle and organise huge amounts of data and large amounts of users at once.
  • Tools Programmers. They build the tools used by designers and artists to create the assets for use in the game.
  • User Interface Programmers. They specialize in making the UI work. All of the meters, displays, timers, button prompts, options, overlays in the game are implemented by these people. They also frequently handle localisation.
  • Animation Programmer. Often shared or imparted upon Gameplay Programmers but frequently specialized also, they take on the building or beating of the animation system into submission.