What activities do video game designers do

Game Designers have a wide range of duties that can vary from game to game and company to company. Depending on where in a project cycle and what type of game it is a wide range of activities will fill a designer's day.

Early in a project, a Lead Designer will often work with the game's Producer to Generate initial game documentation such as a GDD (General Design Document) or Build Spec. Game designers often will define the story, theme, and most importantly game-play of a game. They are creative enthusiastic designers who have a keen sense of game-play and game mechanics. Often they are called upon to get pretty deep into AI, or look and feel and a solid technical understanding as well as vision is often important. They are called upon to figure out and document how the game is going to work.

Later other designers will join the team. They have a wide range of skills and duties that range from level design (creating maps or white-boxed game levels), AI tweaking, and scripting. Scripting is different than writing a script but often involves, putting characters, cut-scenes, and other trigger-able events into the world and defining to an extent how the pieces built by programmers will fit together. Some game types have considerably different needs from their designers. Designing a turn based strategy game is going to be a lot different than designing a puzzle game. A Computer Science degree is useful but not always required. Later in a project designers will polish their work and address bugs that are encountered during the testing process.

As a Producer at a game company I did some design work for one of our projects. I made maps in Illustrator, then used one of my studio's proprietary tools to build the levels in the game's engine, placed the playable characters and enemies, defined the paths and logic for moving platforms, switches, and doors, and set up cut-scenes and in game chatter. Other designers have considerably different experiences.