What are the main jobs and necessary skills for a game designer?

Are game designers common in small indie games projects?

What would be the major difference between game designers and project managers? Is possible to have both of them in a small indie project with no budget or the project manager would usually do the game designers function?

Well, the game designer creates the game's design. (They can do a lot of other things, but this is the core one the role is named after.) A design is like a vision combined with a plan. So a game designer must be able to come up with a vision for a game and then communicate it through writing and/or drawing. Research skills are important too - the game designer is responsible for being familiar with the range of existing game designs and learning from the successes and problems of others' designs. All game projects require a game designer unless you are doing a strict emulation of an existing game. For small projects the game designer is also often either the main programmer, the main artist, or both.

As far a budgetless indie projects go, they rarely succeed at all unless the game in question is a very small and simple one. The chance of success for such projects is somewhat higher if between one or two people you have all the skills necessary to create the game. Even a small budget can help a lot - for example if you have two people who can do everything but music, and you have a small budget, you can use that small budget to outsource the music rather than trying to recruit a third volunteer to fill that hole.

In smaller indie teams the designer usually also fills another role -- often art or programming -- rather than working solely on design. There usually isn't a dedicated project manager or anything resembling typical corporate structure, as most of these teams are very small with only the minimum number of people required to complete the game.

Yeah as above, on small teams it's hard to keep a full time designer, manager, or producer busy, so a designer will probably do code or art (or level design) as well.

Even on larger games, often a game designer also fulfils the role of a producer (like a project manager) - keeping track of which features are being implemented at which times, and liasing between the many staff working on each feature to ensure everything goes smoothly.

Thank you for the answers.

So the tasks of a game designer in general would be content, world, system design and story writing.

In general in medium and larger companies do game designers need to know how to program?

So the tasks of a game designer in general would be content, world, system design and story writing.

In a smaller team a designer may work on some or all of these, but for larger teams in a professional environment some of these are separate jobs that may be given to different people.

Content will probably be created by artists, and the story will probably be written by writers.

Designers are concerned with gameplay systems and interactions (see "what are game mechanics?"), creating and fine-tuning formulas (for damage calculations, reward schedules, frequency of random encounters, etc.). They are likely to create design documentation (game design documents, diagrams, flowboards, spreadsheets of game stats, etc.).

Note that this is assuming typical western titles; in Japan it's common that a "designer" is an artist.

In general in medium and larger companies do game designers need to know how to program?

Not necessarily, but it's valuable to know at least some of the basics, as it's reasonably common for designers to directly tweak values by adjusting config files, editing or writing scripts or adjusting smaller sections of code.

For a design role you should be good at math (statistics are particularly useful), and should have a solid understanding of how different gameplay elements interact and how to create a good user experience.

Thank you for the answers.

So the tasks of a game designer in general would be content, world, system design and story writing.

In general in medium and larger companies do game designers need to know how to program?

System design, yes. Content and story writing, not so much. Content is the art, text, and music that actually go into the game, and in a larger team these details will be delegated to an artist, writer, or musician as appropriate. Only in a small team is the designer a primary content creator. Instead, besides system design, major tasks of a designer include concepting (which is like writing outlines/descriptions or sketching needed content, rather than creating the actual content) and documentation writing (the features list, design document, flowcharts or a storyboard). Good communication skills are also used for writing lots of emails/posts and assignment descriptions to any other team members; and let me again mention research, it's actually important and requires research and analysis skills that many people don't have.

If the designer is also handling the project manager role, they would also have to do things like writing recruitment materials, conducting interviews, creating a project website or private forum, creating a kickstarter, or presenting a proposal to investors; all sorts of scheduling, maintaining team morale by giving pep talks and praise, and arbitrating between arguing team members are also part of the manager's role. The project manager role takes a ton of leadership and secretarial skills.

Good communication skills are also used for writing lots of emails/posts and assignment descriptions to any other team members

This is worth highlighting, communication is important in any development role, not just for designers.

In general in medium and larger companies do game designers need to know how to program?

In some you do and others you don't. However if you plan to be a game designer for a long term career I'd say its an absolute must that you learn some basic level of proficiency in a couple of scripting languages.

To be a good designer you should have a broad understanding of all the systems that make up game development such as code, producing art, level design.

The game designer I worked with in a small company (about 10 people) worked solely on game design. His main tasks was :

- Designing the mechanics (the character is able to throw daggers)
- Write the documentation affiliated
- Ajusting the balance of the mechanics (the daggers will do one-shot kill!)
- and always, always refining the mechanics (the daggers are too powerfull, they will now do less damages)

We worked on UDK, so he had to be able to know how to use the engine. Basic scripting, level design, but mostly tweaking the values.