Like game programmers and artists, game designers help put the game together. The designers, however, come up with the actual ideas for the games; making maps, terrain, and coming up with the characters.
Being a Game Designer is not just thinking up ideas that you think would be awesome in a game, there's also a lot of hard work involved. There are some perks because the first part of becoming a Game Designer is you have to really, really like games. “You should be the kind of person that hears the theme song of a game in your sleep," this website says. This is because you have to play your projects a lot to identify any bugs within it and also to see if any problems might arise in the future. You cannot do that if you don't like games. You also have to have good problem solving skills so you can work out the bugs and problems you find in the game. Thirdly, you have to be devoted to making your game awesome so that people will want to play it. In order to know how do that, you must know what makes a game good or bad, so you must play a lot of games and find out what makes those games good or bad. Lastly you must be able to work under pressure to be able to meet milestones and deadlines so that you will get paid.
The time while you are working under pressure, meeting those deadlines, is what is know as crunch time. This is the period of time when you have to work and work to meet a deadline so that the publisher, who funds the development of the project, will pay the developing company so they can then pay their employees. Crunch time can sometimes-mean 60 to 80 hour workweeks along with working over the weekends. This is so that the developers might be able to catch up with the deadline or milestone. Employees in the United States are not paid over time while "crunching" because usually all employers keep salaried pay, so procrastinating in game developing is not a good idea, unless you like working for free.
While getting the job in game designing itself requires experience under your belt and a lot of hard work, it is also a key factor in determining your wage. Game Designers' wage is usually salaried and that salary is based on the experience you have in your field, your design role, and the location of your working area. Your experience might come from education courses involved with computers, to knowing designing techniques, to actual games on the market with your name on it. Game developers, depending on their level of experience and the location of their work make from $30,000 to $65,000. High ranked developers with a lot of experience can make well over $100,000.
Another perk of being a game designer is your working environment. Working conditions are usually casual and “t-shirts and sandals are common work attire. Game Designers can come into work around 10 am, though they still work at least a 40-hour week. Many people think that game designing is just a cushy job but you have to put a tremendous amount of work into it including long hours involving crunch time which can have a big impact on your personal life.
Making games is fun but its not always easy. Long hours and a ton of dedicated hard work are needed to design games and make them reach deadlines on time in order to get the game out on the market so you can get paid.
