Raph’s Website » Typical game dev teams

Typical game dev teams

November 2nd, 2007 (Visited 5409 times) Tags:

Is there an outline somewhere that one of you professional game people can point to that describes, in general terms, the people involved (by title/position) and what they actually do in a game-production team? What does a ‘designer’ do? And I’m sure that varies a great deal with individual projects and particularly with team size, but I’d love to be able to follow along with these conversations.

Sure. Note, lots of variation here, but this is the gist of it. Roles often get combined.

Business owner (often called exec producer)

Manages:

Process owner (often called producer or director)
Vision owner (often called director or producer, sometimes lead designer)

Those two may be the same person. May not. They manage, directly or indirectly:

Manager of programmers (often called technical director or lead programmer)
Manager of artists (often called art director)
Manager of designers (often called lead designer)

Each of these then can have a team:

Specialty lead (lead client programmer, lead systems designer, lead animator, etc)
Specialists (systems designer, scripter, environment artist, rigger, UI programmer)

Sound and music often use centralized or outsourced resources, so you may or may not have in the mix:

SFX people
Composer
Cutscene people

Then there’s QA, marketing, etc, but typically these have their own management tree.

Typical specialties:

Rendering: the compelx programming required to get pictures on the screen.
Network programming:programming for network based play is its own speciality.
Database programming: so is programming to interact with databases.
Engine programming: usually the guts of how a game works.
Gameplay programing: usuallysystems specific to a game.
UI programming: usually someone has to be devoted to just the HUD and controls.
Tools programming: every team has someone who makes tools for everyone else. Maya exporters, placement tools, etc.
FX programming: stuff like particle systems often consume insane amounts of time.
Systems design: designing how the gameplay will actually work.
Game balance: running numbers, mostly. A highly valuable (and rare) subspecialty.
User interface design: often pushed off on artists or lead designers.
Behavioral scripting: adding new game behaviors — this is what we usually think of as “scripting designers.”
Writing: what it says on the tin.
Content design (quest writing, itemization, etc): filling in data in tables, usually.
Level design: map building. Straddles the line between art and design, usually.
Texturing: making pretty textures.
Technical artist: may write shaders in code. May help set the tech specs for the art.
Modeling: making 3d meshes.
Rigging: setting them up to animate.
Animating: actally animating them. These two are not the same thing, and some people ar ebetter at one than the other.
Environment creation: a specialty of artist that is good at making places.
Lighting: oftne pushed off on one artist, but there’s a bunch of chops required.
Foley: sound effects.
Music

I am sure I am forgetting some. All these roles always exist, it’s a question of how many hats someone wears.

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Game Tycoon wrote on November 5th, 2007 at 5:22 am:

, kids equipped with Nintendo’s Brain Age were found to become better at math, faster in exams, and most interestingly, better behaved in class. For my readers who are new to this industry: Raph Koster has posted a nicesummary of every rolein a game development team. You might be surprised by its length. Via Kim, a game called Swypeout that ships with a USB bar code reader. Collectable Swypeout cards can be purchased, processed by the reader, and imported into an online racing game

University of Ulster Creative Computing @ Coleraine Research Group wrote on November 11th, 2007 at 5:57 pm:

Raph Koster’s blog

VIRTUAL ILLUSION: Profissão multidisciplinar wrote on November 2nd, 2007 at 2:51 pm:

[...] Koster publica hoje no seu blog aquilo que ele considera serem as posições de uma equipa de produção de videojogos AAA. Como [...]

Isragames wrote on November 3rd, 2007 at 11:07 am:

game production HR…

ttp://www.raphkoster.com/2007/11/02/typical-game-dev-teams/trackback/ Raph Koster has some useful i…

NForget.com | Level One, Nathan Forget's Blog » Blog Archive » links for 2007-11-06 wrote on November 5th, 2007 at 11:18 pm:

[...] Roles on a typical game dev team There are lots! [...]

Casually Hardcore devlog » Am I am Art Director? Producer? Lead developer? wrote on December 27th, 2007 at 10:02 pm:

[...] reference, here is Raph Koster’s llst of typical game development roles which I think is fantastic. You can see how teams of 50-100 people aren’t unreasonable in [...]

Jeff Freeman » My spidey sense was tingling wrote on March 2nd, 2008 at 4:34 am:

[...] Jeff Freeman said on November 12th, 2007 at 10:22 pm: Morgan, for a company that’s essentially making tools for game designers, that chart is remarkably designer-lite. [...]

BadMisterFrosty said on November 2nd, 2007 at 4:13 pm:

Nice (and useful) overview. Thank you for that.

John Donham said on November 2nd, 2007 at 5:19 pm:

Also common to see producers or associate producers get teamed up with department leads. So you might see an art producer paired up with the art director, design producer with lead designer, etc.

T. Carl said on November 2nd, 2007 at 5:42 pm:

You don’t have producers of the non-executive sort on there. The lube that ideally gets it all running smoothly together. And possibly gets coffee.

Raph said on November 2nd, 2007 at 6:34 pm:

Yes I do… listed as “process owner.” They aren’t always called “producer” these days… sometimes they are “Development directors” and stuff like that.

Morgan Ramsay said on November 2nd, 2007 at 7:56 pm:

For quality assurance, the hierarchy is like so, top to bottom: vice president, director, manager, supervisor, project lead, and senior analyst and junior analyst, who can specialize in black box, white box, and compatibility testing as well as localization/translation.

I’m not quite sure about all the roles, but I’ll make a few assumptions for kicks.

The vice president is responsible for the performance of the function of quality assurance to executive management. The director is responsible for the performance of the division. The manager is responsible for the performance of all the teams. The supervisor, I think, serves as a liaison between human resources, management and project leads.

The project leads are responsible for the performance of their respective teams. I believe senior analysts are liaisons between junior analysts and leads, often acting as mentors. Junior analysts comprise the bulk of the testing team whether on the floor specializing in black box or in their own departments specializing in white box, compatibility, and localization.

Jare said on November 2nd, 2007 at 8:45 pm:

Interesting and growing in importance are the planners / project managers / associate producers (some places may also call them development directors, misleading as that may be). This may be what T.Carl was referring to.

They normally follow a parallel hierarchy paired with the directors / leads. Their main role is to help break down, prioritize, document and track the tasks, and coordinate resource allocation and dependencies / relations with other teams and external providers. They normally don’t make technical decisions about what or how should be made, but they make sure that what has to be done gets done, and carry out more bureaucratic tasks.

Good ones are an absolute joy to have in a team.

Jeff Freeman said on November 3rd, 2007 at 12:39 am:

Tons of people read this blog, and I’m guessing most are not in the game industry.

I’d be *really* interested in your non-game-developer readers outlining typical team structures in *their* industries.

Morgan Ramsay said on November 3rd, 2007 at 1:42 am:

There should be a “Wikipedia” for HRM and organizational structures, but with charts…

Well, there’s Forbes.com’s Corporate OrgChartWiki and They Rule, but those are collections of organizational structure charts for specific companies.

I wonder if there’s a free version of OrgPlusLive. I mean Geni is free, and that’s for what you could call really, really big organizational structure charts (sorry, I can’t bring myself to use the abbreviation anymore!) Cogmap looks good, but it’s only for specific companies, too.

Of course, there are a billion flow chart 2.0 tools, but which one to use? *sigh*

Phillip Wessels said on November 3rd, 2007 at 4:08 am:

Hey, this is pretty useful. I’m guessing that Creative Director is a combination of process owner and vision owner?

I have to admit though, I’m pretty confused as to what the process is for a few of these. I’m an aspiring game designer (one in millions, no doubt), and I think based on your descriptions that I particularly enjoy systems design, UI design, and content design (though I have art skills as well), but I have no idea as to how the design process for these things work in the professional environment.

It doesn’t help that education surrounding game design in general is pretty weak. This is especially the case at my university (CSU Monterey Bay), where apparently game design = game development. Our education is also supposedly the fundamentals… yet I have a hard time swallowing animation as a fundamental of game DESIGN, and somehow the process behind creating a design doc not being in the curriculum. What’s up with that? I’m hoping a minor in teledramatic arts will help a bit, but I have my doubts. I don’t like that I’ll probably end up having to attend the SanFran Art Institute after I get my degree…

Anyway, back to the design process. Personally, I have a little notebook and I write down ideas in it until I get the time to upload and further clarify in my project wiki (which might someday double as a design doc), and afterwards I attempt to get constructive feedback from some gamer friends (not exactly reliable…). How’s it work in the industry?

Damion Schubert said on November 3rd, 2007 at 10:31 am:

I’m guessing that Creative Director is a combination of process owner and vision owner?

The Creative Director role is usually the vision guy. His job is to be sure that the game has coherency. Sometimes, the Creative Director is called the ‘Lead Designer’ instead – in many companies, the title difference simply means the company needed to promote him and give him a raise to keep him.

On projects that have both, the CD is the vision guy, whereas the LD is the guy trying to make it happen. Think of the CD as the general, and the LD as the Sergeant.

moo said on November 3rd, 2007 at 4:35 pm:

Interesting list Raph! We call them different things, but I think we have most of the roles on that list.

On our teams, one highly experienced programmer is assigned the role Technical Architect. The Technical Architect is usually the most knowledgeable guy on the team about every little bit of the engine code. His job is to be in charge of the overall architecture of the engine, and make high-level technical decisions about its design and the direction it evolves in. Unlike a Lead Programmer, he doesn’t have any people to manage or paperwork to push, so he can devote himself 100% to solving thorny technical problems.

We lump Rendering, FX Programming and some related bits of Engine work together under the rubric of “3D Programmer”. Each team usually has several of those. My current project has about 40 programmers, of which about half are doing engine and tools stuff (as opposed to AI/gameplay/scripting stuff). About 5 of the engine team are 3D Programmers.

When it comes to sound, we have at least two specialty roles: Sound Designer (usually one or two per project) and Sound Integrator (a handful of these per project). All but the smallest teams will have at least one Sound Programmer on the engine team, too. Most people seriously underestimate the complexity and scope of sound in games. The last game I worked on used an in-house-developed sound library which had man-decades of investment in it, and made up (if I remember correctly) about 10% of all the binary code size of the game. At the beginning of that project, the Sound Programmer was actually the first programmer to start work on the team (other than the leads).

moo said on November 3rd, 2007 at 4:54 pm:

About rigging: Modern game characters often have anywhere between 50 and 100 bones in their skeletons. Some of them may be procedural bones whose position, orientation, etc. are computed automatically by the engine (rather than being controlled by the animators). Think of bulging muscles, bouncing boobs, etc. Characters may also require special rigging to make their hair flop around, or their baggy pant legs move when they move, things like that. Engines usually have specific technical constraints that need to be observed when setting up the characters.

The Rigger is the guy who sets all of this stuff up on the character. The process can require several iterations to get right the first few times, and even when production is running smoothly it still takes upwards of an hour per character model. It can be done by a very technical animator (Lead Animator or similar), but its likely to be outside the expertise of the regular Animators, particularly if your company uses several different engines. Usually the people with Rigging skills do some other job most of the time, since their services at Rigging are only needed for a week here or there.

moo said on November 3rd, 2007 at 5:16 pm:

Oh.. the skinning of 3D meshes is affected by the things done by Riggers, so sometimes the same person does both.

Christopher Weeks said on November 3rd, 2007 at 7:40 pm:

Wow. Thanks, Raph!

If you’re taking requests, I’d love to see how people typically advance into and out of those positions too. (I could imagine this being a considerable time burden though, so I won’t hold my breath.

Morgan Ramsay said on November 3rd, 2007 at 11:13 pm:

If you’re taking requests, I’d love to see how people typically advance into and out of those positions too.

You’d have to ask someone in HR, or wait until Areae has been around long enough for Raph to have data on those trends available. Any HR manager at any of the top publishers should be able to tell you. I know they put that information in training handbooks.

Len Bullard said on November 5th, 2007 at 7:08 am:

There was an interview on the Peter G. show this weekend with a famous porn star/director. Her comment on working the non-porn side of the street was interesting. I paraphrase: “I was shocked by all of the people on the set who are paid to do literally nothing. In our industry, we pay people well to do many jobs. They pay many people to do one job. If I were the producer, my first act would be to fire over half of them.”

One wonders if the bubble of big money game design is about to burst as the new companies and common technologies come on line. The notion that there are always more people who can do content than can write code is a little bizarre.

The elephant in the room of virtural worlds, games, and the so-called ‘user generated content sites’ is the disparity of pay between the content generators and the code-owners. It will be fascinating to watch this as the Internet does to games what blogs have done to print journalism.

Tess said on November 5th, 2007 at 10:19 am:

Since Christopher asked what designers do, I should point out that I occasionally jest to aspiring game designers that I would never want to be a game designer, myself, because it involves too much time staring at spreadsheets. This usually results in a quizzical look from the aspirant, and a “Huh?”

Programmers don’t work in numbers. We don’t make data (except procedurally, and some would argue, very badly, at that). We don’t decide how many hitpoints a Sniveling Gorbleblat has, or how hard the Mace of the Everfrog hits. We just build the bread machine that all these delicious ingredients go into.

So, contrary to popular fantasy, a designer’s primary job is NOT being an “idea guy.” They would be better described as “decision people.” Designers have to make a lot of decisions. A LOT of decisions. Sometimes, they’re making decisions that dictate what kind of attachments the programmers are putting on their mighty bread machine of doom. But, other times, they’re staring at lots of tiny numbers in a spreadsheet.

Personally, I’ll be over here with my screwdriver and my wrench. Numbers? Not for me.

isildur said on November 5th, 2007 at 2:59 pm:

I often find myself disabusing the enthusiastic about how much ‘idea’ time goes into my job. Ideas are cheap. Execution is not.

Ian Holmes said on November 5th, 2007 at 8:39 pm:

And now for something completely different (well, actually a response to Jeff @7). Here’s an orgchart for academic research in computational biology:

Principal investigator

Postdocs & “super-postdocs” (senior postdocs on their 2nd or 3rd post-PhD placement)

Various levels of stoodent (PhD, Masters, undergrads)

Web/AJAX developer

Programmer(s)

System administrator

Bioinformatics data analysts

Database administrator

Data curator (e.g. genome annotation, ontology curation, literature sifter, etc.)

Um, as for who manages who, well it often doesn’t really work like that… more like mentorship/anarchy… not sure if this even qualifies as an orgchart really… oh well

moo said on November 6th, 2007 at 6:19 am:

@Len: I wouldn’t discount the cost of creating good content yet. User-created content has a big problem to overcome before it displaces the standard big-bag-of-money approach to content generation. The problem is: 95% of user-created content sucks, and the other 5% does not fit well together in the same game!

Its kind of like saying, “Pretty soon no one will hire a full cast and crew to make movies, instead they will just take their camera down to the town square and record people doing whatever they want to do”. Yes you can do that. No, the result won’t be anything like the movies of today (and 95% of it will be boring boring boring).

Christopher Weeks said on November 6th, 2007 at 8:12 am:

I guess I’ll pony up for Jeff@7 too. I write small server, desktop and web applications in .NET (yeah, yeah, there’s a niche for everything The orgs where I’ve worked look like:

Fortune 100:
big department (associate director) > lone, secret RAD developer to address urgent needs without the mountains of planning and budgetting needed to get a project going. The org in that case was largely just a cloud of folks that I met with but had no clear relation to me other than sharing office space and management. There were whole huge DBA and networking departments that supported my rogue operations but were “out of sight” from my org-chart perspective.

Retail chain with ~500 employees:
President/CEO > CIO > four developers with various strengths leveraged ad hoc to conquor whatever problems and meet whatever needs arise. At that same bottom rung are the two-person helpdesk, one business analyst, the one-man network/desktop support guy and a contract DBA firm.

Small service bureau with ~150 employees:
President > Director if IT > five developers, some of whom are senior and act as mentors to others. At that same bottom run are three network/desktop support guys.

I have this idea that “real” software developers have all these fix roles: UI, business object, data access, DBA, analyst, project manager, etc. But across several jobs and over abous six years in development, I’ve never worked somewhere like that. The team has always been pretty informal in sharing strengths and knowledge. I wonder if that perceived ideal is the “right” way to do it but it’s acutally kind of rare, or if I’m just working with small-sample statistics.

Sean Bulger said on November 7th, 2007 at 5:46 am:

Spiffy. This is a fantastic post. I’ve seen a lot of those titles thrown around before and I’ve looked up enough companies to get at least a jist of how one is setup, but this actually clears up a few things. I think I’ll pass this around to a few people too…

Len Bullard said on November 7th, 2007 at 6:16 am:

I wouldn’t discount it either, Moo. Although, as the tools improved and got cheaper in music, the ability to produce a good piece by a small group improved. IOW, good talent does good work and good tools take the place of the support crew. The follow-on though is that this isn’t equally distributed. A good hand on the axe is not the same as good ears in the remix and so on. On the other other hand, who would have believed transistor radios would be more popular than good stereo systems in earlier decades or that people would accept the awful sound of mp3s?

Compromises in multiple dimensions lead to proliferation. It’s a function of demand over talent and distribution. IMO, the 3D on Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth is terrible but artists with a decent hand at using their editors can make a goodly shekel cold calling businesses and offering to take them out of flatland. As those addresses in the map become the gateways to much better standalone interiors, the follow on market expands. Now the competition for the talent expands as well although prices will fall.

The expanding talent pool will gut the game market pricing. The rest follows naturally. The profit basis has to shift to longer terms. This is what happened in music. The initial burst (a two or three year cycle based on the hits) is followed in the next rehosting cycle when the same content can be resold because it is in a new format or medium. Movie producers screwed up by destroying aging stock prior to Ted Turner creating a new market for old footage given a new means of distribution (cable) and a new audience (college kids up at night after 11 high and hungry and chatty). Similar things happened in the music business. The digital content for single proprietary engines will suffer the same losses. Caveat vendor.

Morgan Ramsay said on November 7th, 2007 at 10:29 pm:

By the way, I created a cogmap (i.e., org chart) for Areae that’s probably not totally accurate. I bet, however, non-neighbors and casual followers of Areae and Metaplace will find some names attached to the company and project of which they were unaware.

Jeff Freeman said on November 12th, 2007 at 10:22 pm:

Thanks for the replies… interesting stuff.

Morgan, for a company that’s essentially making tools for game designers, that chart is remarkably designer-lite.

Not suggesting that’s any sort of unintentional oversight… but it does make me curious about the alternative… intentions.

Morgan Ramsay said on November 13th, 2007 at 12:55 am:

Well, you have to take into account the experience of the team members and the fact that in small firms everyone wears many hats. Raph has a design background. So does John, Thor, and Chapman. Thor also wrote two books on online games development.

If you discount the advisors and investors, and business development, there are around eight direct contributors to Metaplace of which about half are designers or implementors with design backgrounds. In my opinion, that would make Areae quite designer-heavy.

Plus, I think—and I’m only guessing—that most of the design work is already done and what’s left is implementation and testing. I saw an early, early version of Metaplace way back in December ‘06 and Raph had already made a virtual world.

I wasn’t impressed with the tools as much as I was with the product’s application. I wouldn’t be surprised if Metaplace changes how we use and think of the Web altogether. There’s more to the platform than what’s been said, and I say that because I don’t feel like the announcement and articles really capture the scope of Metaplace as thoroughly as did the diagram that was on Raph’s whiteboard.

Jeff Freeman said on November 14th, 2007 at 12:08 am:

Oh, I wasn’t questioning the qualifications of those who were on the chart. I’ve even worked with Raph and John.

It’s just that programmers typically make programmer-tools that designers can use, rather than designer-tools that can eventually be cooked enough for anyone to use.

That’s if the programmers have design backgrounds… otherwise without a designer at their elbow to explain just how horribly misused their tools can be… yech.

As I expect the target user is not a professional game designer, but more of the “anyone” sort – well like I said, it left me curious.

Hiring atypical programmers is one solution (which I think you are suggesting is the case), but Raph also has a real knack for utilizing online communities as part of the development process.

Or there might be some wacky plan to field-test it via a contest in which the viewers decide who goes home, and who moves on to the finals and a chance to win a job in game development and a date with Raph Koster. Who Wants to be a Game Designer?

So… those would be more interesting.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Metaplace changes how we use and think of the Web altogether.

So it is gonna be Second Life 2?

Morgan Ramsay said on November 14th, 2007 at 2:43 am:

Every time I see Second Life, I see Adobe Atmosphere. Second Life doesn’t have a leg to stand on when propped up side-by-side with Metaplace. SL is going down!