Level Design

Level Designers take the individual components created by the development team and tie them together to create the encounters players experience while they play. Within the discipline, there are sub-specializations into narrative, environmental set dressing, or scripting of game content.

Level Design Careers

Technical Designer: Merges game design and programming, focusing on the game mechanics’ technical sides.
Design Lead: Oversees the game design team, ensuring the game’s vision is realized through gameplay mechanics, level design, and narrative.
Environmental Level Designer: Focuses on creating immersive game environments, including layout, aesthetics, and interactive elements.
Narrative Designer: Crafts the game’s story, characters, and dialogue, integrating narrative elements seamlessly into gameplay.
Creative Director: Leads the overall vision and direction of a game, coordinating between various departments to ensure creative cohesion.
Production Support: Provides organizational and logistical support to the game production process, ensuring timelines and resources are efficiently managed.

Game Art

Game Artists are responsible for creating the assets used in game. Within the industry, artists specialize into a number of sub-fields, taking advantage of extremely powerful tools like Substance Designer, ZBrush, and Maya to do everything from hard-surface modeling to realistic or stylized characters, and procedural materials.

Game Art Careers

3D Generalist: Handles multiple aspects of the 3D production pipeline, such as modeling, texturing, lighting, rigging, animation, rendering, and compositing.
Environmental Artist: Create and lay out digital 3D environments — from compiling an entire set to scattering tiny rocks — that form the world of a film or video game.
UI Artist: Oversees the implementation and optimization of user-friendly graphics, icons, and buttons to help players understand complex games or game features.
Cinematics Artist: Oversees the cinematic elements of the game, ensuring there is a coherent flow of action and aesthetics between and throughout all scenes.
3D Animator: Brings inanimate objects to life through precise movements.
VFX Artist: Creates photoreal, digitally generated imagery and seamlessly integrates these effects.
Character Artist: Creates and draws the visual elements of a game such as the characters, environment, vehicles, weapons, and other props.
Previsualization Artist: Helps plan out what a game will look like through 2D storyboards and 3D animatics.

Coding

Coders use computer languages within game engines to create or extend the features in games or to create tools for others to use to create content. Coders are the first to see things in action inside the game, and the tools they create are the foundation of the game industry.

Coding Careers

Gameplay Programmer: Writes the code for the interactions that make a game fun to play.
Network Programmer: Uses computer code to write programs or processes that can communicate with other programs or processes across a network.
Audio Programmer: Ensures that a game's audio assets load smoothly, trigger correctly, and play back in high quality while using minimal processing power.
Technical Director: Represents the company's interests, directs the team as they work on the project, and facilitates technology transfer during the project.
Software Architect: Creates plans for project-specific technical requirements and builds technical standards for tools, platforms, or software coding standards.
Technical Artist: Hybrid creative and technical operators who liaise between the artist and the programmer teams.
Tools Programmer: Helps others make better games, working on internal tools that help artists and designers get their art and ideas into the game as effortlessly as possible.