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The Complete Guide to Becoming A Video Game Designer
The real pay, the real path, and the real day-to-day of the job - enough to decide if it's worth it before you spend a dime on a degree.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Video Game Designer Actually Do?
Ask ten people on the street what a video game designer does all day, and you will get ten variations of the same romantic answer: they play video games and dream up cool new ones. That is a pleasant fantasy, and it has absolutely zero relation to the job. The reality is less glamorous, but if you are reading this guide, you need to know what you are signing up for before you spend years - and potentially six figures - on a path that might not suit your actual working style.
Let me be direct with you: a video game designer is a problem solver who uses words, numbers, spreadsheets, and diagrams to define how a game feels to play. They are not the person who draws the hero or the one who writes the code that makes the hero move. That is the artist and the programmer, respectively. The designer is the person who writes down the rule that says: the hero can jump twice as high when a player presses the button twice in quick succession. They are the one who decides how many hit points a boss has, when the camera should pull back during a chase, or what items a player finds on the third level.
The most important thing to understand immediately is that design is a series of deliverables - things you must physically produce on a schedule. The days of