Abstract
Problem: What are the different roles in game development, and what does each one actually do?
Approach: Tim Cain draws on his decades of experience at studios like Interplay and Obsidian to walk through the full hierarchy of game development roles — from game director down to junior staff — across every major department.
Findings: Game teams are organized into clear hierarchies (director → lead → principal → senior → staff → junior) that repeat across programming, art, and design. Producers keep the schedule and interface with publishers. Strike teams of ~5-6 people tackle specific features. The boundaries between roles (especially narrative designers and level designers) are often blurry and collaborative.
Key insight: The hierarchy is remarkably consistent across departments (programming, art, design), but the areas within each department differ wildly — and smaller studios compress multiple roles into fewer people.
Game Director
The game director (also called project leader) is the keeper of the vision. They decide the design pillars, set goals for every feature, and sometimes write the design docs themselves. Toward the end of development, no one plays the game more than the director (except possibly QA) — they need to see every part of the game to make sure everything aligns with the vision.
Producers
Producers come in roughly three tiers:
Executive Producer / Lead Producer
- Keeps the master schedule — aggregates estimates from all departments to predict when the game will ship (which may not match when it's supposed to ship)
- Primary interface with the publisher, studio leadership (president, VPs, HR)
- Manages other producers and coordinates external development (outsourced cinematics, localization, etc.)
- In smaller companies, the lead producer is the executive producer
Assistant / Associate Producer
- Reports to the lead/EP
- Manages strike teams — small groups of ~5-6 people (programmers, artists, designers) focused on a specific feature (combat, stealth, cinematics, lighting, etc.)
- Keeps schedules for their strike teams and passes numbers up to the master schedule
- Tim notes that at Interplay, both assistant and associate producers were affectionately called "APs" — he can never remember which title outranks the other
The Shared Hierarchy
Programming, art, and design all share the same organizational structure:
- Director (Programming Director, Art Director, Design Director) — manages the department
- Lead — manages a specific area within the department
- Principal — highly specialized individual contributor, doesn't manage anyone, works adjacent to leads
- Senior — can manage their own work, make their own estimates, flesh out designs
- Staff (sometimes untitled) — experienced workers who know their area and report to seniors
- Junior — newly hired, still learning
On smaller projects, you might only have a lead with seniors managing sub-areas. On larger projects like The Outer Worlds, the full hierarchy is in play.
Programming Areas
- Graphics — rendering, shaders, visual systems
- Gameplay — combat mechanics, stealth rules, dialogue systems (attracts generalists since it connects to everything)
- AI — enemy behavior, NPC intelligence
- UI — user interface implementation
- Networking — multiplayer, online systems
Art Areas
- 3D Modelers — create the models
- Texture Artists — paint surfaces onto models (2D skill!)
- Riggers — add bone structures so models can move
- Animators — make models actually move
- Concept Artists — draw what the game should look like (levels, scenery, furniture, marketing art)
- Cinematics Artists — create cutscenes
- Motion Capture Artists — suit up people (and dogs!) to capture real movement
Tim emphasizes there's plenty of room for 2D artists in modern games — textures, UI icons, fonts, and interfaces are all 2D. He believes there are probably more 2D artists in the industry today than there were in the 1990s when games were entirely 2D.
Design Areas
- Systems/Mechanics Designers — character builds, combat mechanics, stealth, dialogue systems, economy
- Narrative Designers — create NPCs, write dialogue, design quests
- UX Designers — design the user experience, work with artists and programmers on interfaces (UX = the experience, UI = the actual thing that pops up)
- Level Designers — build maps, lay out towns and points of interest, implement quests
Tim shares a memory of catching a narrative designer and level designer talking excitedly in the hallway — these two roles work very closely together since NPCs give quests but level designers place the encounters and items.
Audio
The audio department handles everything you hear:
- Music
- Sound effects — items, particle effects, containers, doors, environmental ambience (wind in trees, background noise)
- UI sounds
- Cinematic audio — music and sound are placed precisely since everything is tightly sequenced
QA (Quality Assurance)
QA has its own director or lead and handles:
- Finding and writing up bugs, maintaining bug reports
- Creating test plans in collaboration with the game director — covering different player builds, play styles ("I talk to everyone," "I do all side quests," "I kill everyone"), platforms (PC vs. different consoles with different certification requirements), and difficulty levels
- Maintaining save libraries so testers can quickly jump to specific scenarios
- Testing minimum and recommended specs — playing on min-spec machines and reporting on frame rate, stuttering, visual quality, and playability
What's Not Covered
Tim deliberately excludes administrative roles (presidents, VPs, HR, marketing) and publisher-side roles (localization, etc.) — these appear in game credits but are generally considered outside the "game development" team proper.