you can be an artist, writer, programmer, animator, etc. You just need to be a video game designer.
You should probably clarify what this means.
You can be anything by profession, as long as as a hobby you design games? That’s quite broad. Anyone can consider him- or her- self a game designer in that sense.
Also, #1 needs explaining. Only in a few major studios such as mine will you have multiple designers on a project (with potentially different tasks). For 99% of everyone else, the conversation would be, “What part of game design do you do?”, followed by, “Um, I do the ‘design’ part of game design.”
Anyway, with ambiguities acknowledged:
#1: I currently don’t. I designed professionally a few games in the past at a studio.
#2: The flexibility in creativity.
#3: While doing game design professionally, I always had a nagging feeling of discomfort. “I’m more valuable as a programmer. I feel as though I am not being fully utilized.” I got restless especially near the end of the projects when the design was basically done and there was still a lot of coding to do. Thanks to office politics I couldn’t be both a designer and a programmer, so it was very stressful looking at the code of the game, knowing I could fix bugs, polish it, etc., but was simply not allowed (this wasn’t the case long long ago when a whole game could be made by a single person, and back then I had a blast because they would just roughly outline what kind of game they wanted and I would design and code it all).
#4: I started as a programmer and showed interest and insight in game design. Others often go through QA/testing. You typically need to target larger studios since only they have designer positions. Smaller studios just take contract work and do the coding, sound, and art, while the contractor does the design.
#5: Overall, Final Fantasy XV. As a designer, those earlier projects I mentioned where I got to do full design and programming.
[EDIT]
Answering in the context where the topic creator meant “game development”.
#1: Professionally, in the video-game industry, I have been a designer, an artist, a musician/sound-effect engineer, a voice actor, project manager, and a programmer. I am currently a programmer.
#2: Everything. Solving problems, creating a quality product that fills me with pride, etc. Every little change I make to a product excites me, whether it is making it run faster, increasing graphics quality, etc.
#3: Being slowed by having to learn new in-house technology. I could knock off tasks a lot faster if I didn’t have to first spend so much time learning the internals of the in-house game engine (I am an R&D programmer—that means I make the underlying in-house engine used for all the games, rather than working on game programming).
#4: Make personal projects. Lots of them. Use them both to learn and get the skills you need for your craft and also to show to potential employers as portfolio work.
#5: Final Fantasy XV.
[/EDIT]
state if you work with a studio
Square Enix (Luminous Studio—Senior Graphics Programmer).
along with your name.
Shawn (L. Spiro) Wilcoxen
L. Spiro
[EDIT]
Did you mean “game development”?
[/EDIT]
