Want to work in the game industry?

I've had a few people telling me that they want to get into the game industry. Since I don't have a lot to say about DD2 right now (I was on vacation last week, studied alternative methods of storing game data the week before, and have mostly been looking for a new job this week) I thought I would go over the different positions in a game company.

Producer - These are the people that talk with the publishers and are basically the boss of a team. They make sure that everyone is working on the right thing and that everything will finish on time. Producers need good management skills and good writing and speaking skills.

Designer - Designers are the people that not only come up with ideas about games, but also the people that end up doing a lot of the grunt work on a game. For example, while making My Japanese Coach we would get a large sound file from a two hour recording session. A designer would then use a tool to cut the sound files, name them, and get me a list of sounds that had pops or clicks in the recording that needed to be redone.

Programmer - Programmers are the people that write the code that makes everything happen. For major games we usually use C/C++. Smaller games may be written in C# (such as Xbox live arcade games), Java, Flash Actionscript, and even PHP.

Artist - Artists are the guys that make all the action worth looking at. I'll let Peter go into more detail about the types of artists that work on games since he knows a lot more about it.

Tester - Yay! Play games all day long and get paid for it! Hehe, sorry. It sounds a heck of a lot better than it is. First off, the games that you are testing are not finished games up until the very end, so you'll be playing a broken game. Over and over and over again. Also, you don't get to just choose which games you'll be testing. After a few months of testing on Barbies Fabulous Pony Ride you might not be so excited ever the idea of being a game tester anymore.

Of course there are also the other jobs that will be in most companies, such as human resources and IT.

Is there a job you want to about in more detail? Any question? Leave a comment!