How much actual programming is needed for a GD. I discovered my passion for GD a few months ago, I am still in high school and right now I am self teaching environments, level design, animation, concept designs, concept art drawing, balancing, game mechanics and low level C#. Let’s say I was hired on a small team that used a modified version of Unity 3D as their Engine. How much C# programming should I be able to do. I know that I need enough so that I don’t need to bug programmers and other devs everytime I need to execute or test my concepts and mechanics but how much does that entail?
One of the big challenges of being a game designer only is that it’s very hard to show off your skills without being able to actually build a game. And without proof of your design ability, it’s hard to get hired as a designer.
How much really depends on what game you want to build. You need enough to get the game built.
I’m a GD, learn programming asap or you will end up bitter idea guys 
You need to be able to do all, focus on manipulating data structure though (sorting, storing, loading, optimizing).
Anyway the difficulty isn’t programming at all. It’s solving problem you will have to translate into code. Your brilliant ideas will have a lot of undefined area, most GD aren’t aware of how unfocus and vague their ideas really are (ie badly designed), you will know that moving a character isn’t as simple as moving a coordinate. Programming will makes you a better GD by drilling in your mind those important details.
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It’s worth emphasising that the game designers role is not to have ideas. When people work in game design, they are not ‘idea guys’.
There is a role for a game designer. And it doesn’t actually need you to be able to program or do art. (In practice many designers come from other technical backgrounds). To find out what an actual designer does google the door problem.
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I know, but the way he phrase it he was totally prompting the idea perspective. Anyway my experience is that any problematic analysis to solution will be seen as “idea” by profane and they will use that to shoot your “opinion” down to further theirs. It happen to me even when I worked in the “industry” (~2008) and you had artist stomping on carefully laid out analysis, of course I have to just wait for their “idea” to collapse on themselves but GD is still not well understood by many people. And even modern GD suffer for lack of design thinking, making “list” is only a small problem of what design is. And I know the door problem too 
What I meant is that a solo GD is more useless in a way artist and programmer are in order to show something concrete to prove themselves. If he want to freely explore gamedesign he better learn programming.
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I would say that most small teams have a plethora of game designers. What they need are programmers and artists.
On a small team, everyone wears many hats and almost everyone is a “game designer”. In our game, I am the game designer, but one of my programmers and my community guy also are game designers. lol I am also an artist and environmental person and the level designer. One of my programmers is the network guy. The only people who have only one title are my two artists and the music guy, who do nothing but art and music. 
So…have a second specialty, be it art or programming.
Now, if you want to go work for a large game company, then you probably only need one specialty, but you better have a lot of training/experience and some good contacts.
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I don’t follow the industry nearly as much as I should, and I really only trouble myself with exactly what I need to be troubled with. So, I don’t know exactly what the job description of a “Game Designer” is. I always assumed this was the person that designed the implementation of the mechanics thought of by “the other guys”. Basically, the person that bridged the gap between idea and reality.
Person A goes, “Sweet feature idea incomin!”
Game Designer goes, “Ok here’s how we have to implement that so it doesn’t suck and works well with the existing systems”
Programmer goes, “Ok I’ve got clear instructions on how to implement this.” type type type.
That sound about right?
Seems to me that most people just sit around jotting ideas down and they think they’re a designer and are going to make the best game ever (not directly speaking to OP, so no offense).
I think it’s important, regardless of if I’m correct or not, to know as much as you can about everything that relates to designing a game. Understanding terms is huge; be able to speak the language. Understand the basics on databases, networking, scope etc. Know art terms and music terms… Ya.
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There is no definite answer to that, it change from studio to studio.
IMHO, and I said that as a professional game designer, Game design in its current state is not worth a “job”, it’s a title, a position, but practically it’s more an education anyone can have, not a specialty. I’m saying that because it’s not a deep enough of a subjects and ask for many knowledge that are already part of many other crucial job needed to make a game.
Generally the game designer is a jack of all trade and tend to rise from technical background who have already work with implementation, he is a generalist. The problem is there will never be a measure of good design (because tastes), and what works or not is simply a measure of playtest to a specific audience.
The thing is, a programmer will have to implement whatever result to a finer granularity that the designer will be able to document anyway. “Make it more responsive” will never be as precise as the specific implementation of a programmer, what does that mean? the programmer will have to figure it out, and in the process do much more design than the game designer, hence why technical background tend to rise to that title.
The other things is that game making are iterative, you do stuff, test, evaluate and correct. Whatever problem will be resolve by this process automatically. The problem is that request a designer might make might be non nonsensical relative to other need, such as animations, so everyone as an authority and an input in the final design, which mean the design generally happen through deliberation of multiple field rather than the game designer’s one, and iteration self correct any problem through test cycles. So finally the designer is only useful to keep track of changes and conduct task that would be distracting to other specialty.
That’s why design as a position change from studio to studio, in big studio it’s important to have them to distribute the load and generic task outside of specialist, it became less relevant on small team with shared ownership. Game designer can be simply documentation, carrying result from play test to distribute them to respective specialty owner. They can be level designer, level builder, level scripter. They can be lead that hold ownership of the direction of the game or the creative director hold that responsibility. It’s nebulous.
Also as I have said the field is not that deep, mostly game relative knowledge is sparse in itself and is complemented by other field such as ergonomic, psychology, visual design, math, statistics, knowledge contain in other specialty anyway! And most so called rules of game design has been broken so consistently they mean nothing.
Good responsive control? QWOP, surgeon simulator. No bugs? skyrim, goat simulator. Fair game? rust, I wanna be the guy. Good graphics? minecraft, dwarf fortress. etc … There was no game specific principles another specialist couldn’t picked up in a week or more either, meaning diffusion of knowledge is quick and reduce the importance of the game designer, and the game end up better if anyone can pick up those skills, and design knowledge did spread to anyone anyway. So yeah, game designer IMHO is a precarious title.
That’s why I did go indie, design is important not the designer.
Learn programming.
Your goal should be “expertise”.
This is pretty much it. Game design work is more about building systems and specs then it is coming up with ideas.