Video Game Designer Salary

The Game Designer

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to describing what it is that a game designer does. To many, it sounds like a free ticket to playing games all day while being paid to do so. While this is incredibly inaccurate, a career in game design can be incredibly fun, and a game designer salary is nothing to scoff at provided you can make it in with the big companies. Here we’ll examine the job, its pay, and what it takes to get qualified to be hired on with the big dogs in the game design industry.

What Does a Game Designer Do?

At base, the job is all about brainstorming, writing, and communicating. The game designer comes up with the initial idea, characters, storyline, puzzles, enemies, and all other aspects of the game. They coordinate these ideas with the Senior Designer and Producer to ensure that the game idea will not only fit what the company wants to create, but also what will fit within the budget and time frame allotted. After the idea is approved, the designer creates documentation that details the game, usually called the Game Design Document, or GDD. It is from here that the other departments, such as art, sound, programming, and animation, get the work they need to do for the game. After the initial planning phase, the game designer is constantly reworking and recreating various aspects of the game and updating these changes in the GDD. But why would the designer change an idea after it has already been detailed and planned? Due to the feedback received from various areas of the development team. If something doesn’t work within a department’s limitations, then it must be changed, and the game designer must update the GDD to reflect these changes.

The Salary

With enough experience it is possible to earn a handsome income from this career path. The average 2011 game designer salary was $72,128.58 per year. This includes the whole gamut of experience from junior game designers earning around $42,000, to mid-level (3-7 years experience) earning around $75,000, up through senior level game designer(7+ years experience) that land six-figure incomes in the $105,000 range. Keep in mind that this will vary with what kind of designer is being examined as well. The video game designer salary are, on average, higher than table-top game designer salaries due to higher responsibilities and a more stressful environment.

Game Designer Prerequisites

So what does it take to become a game designer? It requires many skills from a whole array of disciplines and backgrounds. A game designer truly needs to be a jack-of-all-trades. They have to communicate with artists, programmers, producers, investors, musicians, the media, and other designers. As a result, not only must the game designer know something of all of these disciplines, but must also speak the language of these job roles. This means that the designer may have to draw out a creature for one person, then discuss how its attacks will interact with the game environment with the programmers, what adding this creature will do to the budget, and what the fans’ likely reactions will be to it.

In short, a game designer has to know how to program (or at least script), draw, work with light and color, write, think logically and creatively, budget time and money, as well as have a good sense of what makes games fun. It’s a lot to be able to work with, which is why the average salary is so high in such a coveted field. If you can get a good working knowledge of these areas, through schooling or self-teaching, then you will be well on your way to an extremely rewarding career.