Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

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some point in your skills growth, you have to make a choice about a career
direction in games. It would be extremely difficult to be an artist/
programmer/audio engineer in today’s game industry, since each of these disciplines
alone requires so much focused knowledge depth. It’s useful to remember that in a
very real sense for many game development teams, each team member is a game designer,
or at least a significant game design contributor. The specific role of “game
designer” is a relatively new position and many game makers struggle to be clear
about exactly which set of skills make up a potent game designer. Many programmers,
artists, and producers have strong abilities in game design and will collaborate
intensely with those taking on the game design role. Other developers prefer not to
get into the muddy design details much at all. They are perfectly content to focus on
their own area specialties and interests.
In this chapter, we’re going to take a look at several of the major game development
career tracks and talk about some of the factors you might want to consider in
making game career choices.
P ROGRAMMING
It’s not easy to be a game programmer. Then again, it’s not easy to be anything in
game development. I’ve always said that if you’re a programmer at heart you’ll know
it. What does this mean? It means that you can’t really make yourself a programmer.
You kind of take to it or you don’t. I know that code editors and debuggers have gotten
much better over time, but when I learned programming, it didn’t feel like programming.
It felt like I spent the majority of my time searching for misplaced semicolons in order
to get something to compile correctly. If I could finally get something to compile
without waving a rubber chicken over the computer, I was done for the day.
I started experimenting with games by writing text games in Basic and recording
them to audiotape on a cassette recorder for the TRS-80 Model 1. If I mucked up the
record volume, the game wouldn’t save. I wrote little games with a friend, and we
broke into the Basic code for arcade shooters and tweaked the code to get new results.
My professional game programming aspirations ended in a college programming
class in the early days of computer graphics. I was building a dart board game using
Pascal. I could barely get the darts to land on the board at all, and the guy sitting next