Game development and game design are not the same thing, but the difference between them often isn’t clear. Treating them as the same thing can lead to issues down the line when you’re working on your game. Trust me, I’ve made that mistake!
So, what is the difference between game development and game design?
Game design is the process of defining what the game will be. Game designers may be an individual or team whose role it is to create the blueprint for every aspect of the game and document it. Game development is the process of taking that blueprint and turning it into a finished product.
In a perfect world, a game’s design process is complete before its development begins, but this is rarely the case. More often than not, the game designer is involved with the game right up to release, with the lines between development and design growing ever more blurry.
Let’s look in more detail at how the two roles interact.
What does a game designer do?
Game design is a creative role that is absolutely key to get right at the start of the project. Designers will be involved in the creation and development of the original idea for the game and understanding how that idea will become a game that people can play.
Every aspect of the game needs to be designed; how the player controls the character, how high the character jumps, if there even is a character, how the player progresses, how the enemies in the game react, how the levels are laid out, what the actual goal of the game is, and any other part of the game that will need to be created by the development team.
There are different ways that a designer may go through this process, including:
- Brainstorming different gameplay ideas
- Building paper or digital prototypes to test those different ideas
- Defining potential issues with the original idea that need solutions
- Playing games in a similar genre and learning from how they dealt with the problems the design is facing
- Sketching out how they see a particularly system working in game
Throughout the process the game designer will also carefully be putting together a series of documents that will outline to the developer exactly how the different systems and elements of the game fit together.
The main document that is most commonly referred to is the ‘Game Design Document’, or GDD. This is a single, huge document – often with numerous supporting documents – that lays out the entire game design in granular detail, sometimes even down to how long a specific enemy will wind up their attack before they cut your head off.
You can find numerous great examples of game design documents online, including the original Doom design document and the original design for Metal Gear Solid 2.
Game designers are also often the person whose name you will hear when people talk about the game. For example, you may have heard of:
- Shigeru Miyamoto, who designed Mario
- John Romero, who designed Doom
- Sid Meier, who designed Civilization
- Ron Gilbert, who designed the Monkey Island games
- Hideo Kojima, who designed Metal Gear
What does a game developer do?
A game developer can refer to the game studio itself, but in this context it’s referring to the team that will be building the game from the game design that’s been detailed in the GDD.
Unless you’re a solo developer, this is not an individual role and rarely is it an individual team. You will most likely have a number of different individuals or teams, each responsible for a different part of the development, including:
- Programmers
- Artists
- Testers
- Quality Assurance
- Audio designers
- Composers
- Producers
- Game directors
- Narrative designers
- Writers
There are often many more roles than those listed above, or they may be referred to by a different title or broken down into sub-roles (for example: concept art, background art, character art, animation and special effects). In larger studios, there can be large teams that are only responsible for a single aspect, such as the game’s visuals or the game’s story.
Sometimes, in smaller studios in particular, some of these roles may be combined. In the case of an solo developer (like me!), they’re going to be responsible for everything or will outsource some of the tasks to freelancers.
What does a game designer do once the game is in development?
It’s rare that everything goes as planned, or that everything has been covered in sufficient detail for the plan to be acted on without a hitch, so game designers are often involved all the way through development.
Often this may that there is an unexpected consequence of a part of the design. For example, a particular combination of unlockable abilities may make the player character invincible, which is something that a game designer would want to come in and fix.
Often, due to time and/or budget constraints, development will begin before the designer feels that the GDD is complete and the design is watertight, leading them to continue designing the game while it’s being developed.
In my own example, I didn’t even know that design and development were really separate things. So, I was effectively designing a bit of the game, then building it, then designing the next bit and so on. This meant that, when the design didn’t work for whatever reason, I had to work out if it was as a result of the part I had just added, or was it something that I’d designed and developed months ago that was the problem?
In all cases, it’s very unlikely that a game design will be 100% perfect, as it’s impossible to know exactly how the experience of playing your game will feel until all of the different parts of it start coming together.
There are also some parts of the design role that are broken out and given to a different individual or team. Most commonly this is the task of level design – the creation of the environments that the player will move through. The level design team will have to work extremely closely with the art team and the narrative design team to ensure that it all fits together. As such, it’s not realistic to expect all level design to be completed before the artists and writers have even started work on the game!
So it’s not necessarily a problem that designers are involved through development, but things are likely to run a LOT smoother if you spend as much time as possible on designing the game before you start making it!
Can you be a designer AND a developer?
Absolutely! There are many solo developers who create entire games by themselves and are responsible for everything from the design to the programming, the art and the sound and music.
In most cases though, when a designer also operates in a development role it is in a specific part of the team. You often see designers who are also writers, for example Tim Schafer and Hideo Kojima, or designers who are also programmers, such as John Romero.
Although game design can sometimes be mixed up with the idea of the person who comes up with how the game will look, it’s quite rare for designers to also take on an art role in the development team on larger releases. However, it’s much more common in the indie game scene, with designers like Edmund McMillen of Team Meat (Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac) and Dan Paladin of The Behemoth (Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers, Battleblock Theatre).
Related questions
What do game designers get paid?
This can vary drastically depending on a number of factors, including:
- The country you work in
- The city you work in
- The amount of experience you have as a designer
- The success of the previous games that you’ve worked on
- The size of the studio that you work for
As a very rough estimate, you’re looking at around $50k starting salary in the US, with salaries across the pond in Europe generally being a little lower than this.
Depending on the factors listed above, this salary could conceivably grow to many times that starting salary, with this report from the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) showing up to $200k – and that was back in 2001!
What do game developers get paid?
This varies in the same way that a game designers salary does, but with the added factor that it depends on the role that you take.
Depending on the type of role, you can expect a starting salary of between $35-50k, with the most common salary among more experienced developers falling between $75-100k. You can find the details in this IGDA report from 2017.