Hi, I am umm…fighder…I am a game design student who mostly do design and coding work in Unity.
So recently one of our peer who got a coop job as a game designer at an AAA studio told me that you will never ever touch code as a game design grad, and I was shocked, because he himself is consider one of the best coder in our program. I always planned on following his path, until he told me this. I also resist the Asset Store a lot, and often code my own systems and mechanics, but now that someone told me that there is really no point, I was wondering how often do people use Asset Store codes in published games.
I can imagine that AAA studios are probably very picking about their programming staff in general, and I would suspect they would generally hire programmers with a math or computer science degree as opposed to a game design degree. On the other hand, it likely depends on what kind of studio and what kind of project. Smaller/indie studios will probably make use of any skills their employees have.
I would agree. As also, using asset store assets would probably be similar. While AAA studios may have funding to hire staff, most indie studios probably don’t. So they would make use of whatever help they can get to get their games launched, including picking up assets and recode/configure to fit their needs instead of having to start from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel when you have one you can adapt to fit your vehicle, so to speak. Cheaper to pick up an asset and rework it to fit your project than hire someone to build it from scratch in most cases.
We have 3-4 game designers on our team. While they don’t actually touch the game codebase, they do a lot of ‘coding’ in various forms. Whether prototyping, scripting game logic or building logic tools. A designer in a larger studio may not directly work on the game’s code, but it is an important skill to have. The nitty-gritty of game design involves a lot of balencing and logic. It’s also important to understand as because ultimately they have to communicate their needs to the engineering team.
As for assets from the store, we don’t directly use any. In part because of dependency and in part because of licensing. For the rare occasions that we do (ngui, marmoset) we license the directly from the vendor, usually with a support contract.
Certainly we expect our designers to go elbow deep into Unity, but not into the code. Basically their work stops if they have to open mono develop or something.
@BrUnO-XaVIeR Whaaaaaaaa? The word docs and spread sheets are the FUN part of making the game. Where anything is possible and you aren’t limited by programmers and artists telling you how impossible it is
Though actually now that I think about it, the designer’s job is actually the opposite. He’s there to prevent the programmer from going off the rails. “The doc wasn’t clear, so I created a new game engine!”
This is relevant. I’m constantly having to pull my self up as a coder. No matter how awesome my system is, it won’t matter if the player never sees it.
The other way around might generally be easier (studying computer science, getting a normal programmer job and saving up money to make games). Studying gamedesign might not be the most efficient way to save up money to study something else later on. But on the other hand really top notch gamedesigners probably can make a good living because the really good ones are hard to find as far as I know.
Only problem with that is that I am already half way through the program and I don’t wanna financial burden my family, so just gonna get the BA and co-ops, and take com sci later on on my own.
Cheaper to pick up an asset and rework it to fit your project than hire someone to build it from scratch in most cases.
He is quite often in Blender… “sketching” layouts as he calls it.