game design : what im looking for

I still dont know what am i look for , but the question here is : i need to make this questions to someone!

what does a game designer with unreal engine ? i mean , does he make the animations , or just try the gameplay and use the blueprint or what?

I think real answer is he makes everything that nobody else does in current team. So it really depends on size of team. The smaller team is the more tasks are for game designer/developer.
But are you sure you not asking about level designer?

Generally you want to have dedicated programmer, character artist/animator, enviroment artist, sound artist, concept artist.
In this case game designer would prototype gameplay for programmer, or at least brainstorm with programmer about what is needed.
Then with artist team he/she would work on coherent art style of game, or more like watch if they all stay on course and make assets for same game.

So basicly , if i want to be a game designer ( using unreal engine for , example ) i would use the asset´s that the artist department would do , and work with programmer , to make the gameplay i want ??

I think we have some slight problem with what we understand as “game designer”. For me it means person responsible for final shape of game.
But i think you rather mean what i would describe as “level designer” (or game developer). So i will describe what i think are tasks for both positions.

Game designer is somebody who tells his/her team how finished game should look, develops gameplay mechanics. Its kind of “idea man”, but with very good knowledge in almost every aspect of game creation, and some expert/guru level in one or two areas. I think that it is best (for game) that this person is expert in programming, because some bad code at beginning of development may ruin everything much later, while bad art assets are much easier to replace.

While “level designer”/“game developer” is person that puts everything together. Gets all assets from artists, reads game documents and creates game out of it. But it is quite hard to get position in game industry as just “level designer”. Much better chances are when you have solid art skills, probably even better if you are programming guru, but then there are big chances you will be assigned to programming forever.

And those guys are much better than me and are much much more qualified to give advice about your question:

Extra Credits: Game Designer

Thanks alot :slight_smile: !

Interesting link Nawrot, and according to them, I would make a great game designer!

Too bad I’m not in a position to do a career change, ah well. Hobbies are fun in of themselves.

If you are a one man army after 3-4 years of game development you’d be a fairly qualified game designer. Of course you’d have an area of expertise, say FPS games. The more experienced a designer is, the more knowledge he has about the different systems in different genres. For example I have many ideas and am currently working on them. However that just means I’m a guy with many ideas, and even though I have the systems and mechanics all outlined, that doesn’t mean I’m a qualified game designer, since along the development cycle I will surely bump into problems that need to be solved and mechanics that will conflict either with each other or with the storyline.

So being a game designer is really all about experience. Making a few games on your own (and more importantly, finishing them) will give you an insight on the challenges a particular genre has in terms of programming, level creation and asset generation. As an example an experienced 2D platformer designer would be a poor choice for an RTS game, since the 2 genres have absolutely nothing in common. On the other hand that same designer could come up with an interesting blend of the 2. Also, you’d want to have played a lot of games, all in varying genres in order to have good mixing ideas. For example a person who has extensively played RTS and FPS games will have a better idea of how to make a top-down shooter with 2 modes, where the player can choose between a first person and a top-down perspective, both of them giving different tactical options.

Also it’s a good idea to play some of the custom Warcraft 3 maps, since they are brimming with ideas that can translate well into fps/tps/etc. Good game ideas come from mixing and further developing existing ones, thereby producing an original take on an old genre, redifining it or outright inventing it.

Kensei you made a good point about finishing the games we work on. That is a huge problem in indie development.

That’s because making a game requires a lot of work even if you know what you’re doing. Starting out however adds on top of this. For instance I come from Unity, so I learned C#. When I started I had the feeling I had to know everything before I knew anything. I get the same feeling with UE4, it’s like you have to know everything before you can say you got your basics down with the engine. So I can see why a lot of people will start a project and then abandon it. Either that or life gets in the way, you dont look at your game for a few months, come back to it and you are completely lost in your own maze of logic. Happened to me twice on a simple game, took me the same amount of time just to decipher my train of thought…keep in mind I was very diligent commenting code blocks. Anyway those were my 2 cents on what I think a designer is, what he/she should know and how is that knowledge best acquired.

I don’t think the video that Nawrot covered it, but you also want to familiarize yourself with world-wide / cultural mythologies. I believe they covered religions, so this may be a subset of that topic though. Most game’s are based on, or loosely around, mythology.