Game dev teams

Found this list of game dev team roles and descriptions of their tasks on Raph Koster's blog. Just thought it was interesting to gain perspective on how much resources and expertise is thrown at a typical game. Compare this with one postgraduate student with at best middling expertise at anything, and with supervisorial oversight, and its easy to feel quite humbled.

Or the opposite, when one considers that one is changing the world! sic ;)

• 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