Learn to Code or Game Design? Which is better? (and why?)

hey there I'm Jason and today I want to talk to you about why I went with game programming over game design for a career I see the question get asked all the time should I study game design should I study game programming or maybe even study just general programming and a lot of people seem to be really confused about what the differences are what the different jobs actually entail and what it's like and today I want to talk about well why I went with what I went with how that kind of happened which was somewhat accidental and I want to talk about what designers and programmers do day to day what the differences are in their jobs some of the little bit of similarities and some of the benefits of each side so you can get a better idea of what's good for you and where you should go so I want to start with my experience when I started off in the game industry I really wanted to be a game designer I didn't really want to do programming wasn't something that was super interesting to me I knew how to code a little bit I'd written a little bit of code and some apps little programs not phone apps but like old-school dos apps and windows apps and g15 apps from my old keyboard to play games or log parsers to get data on the games that I was playing but game programming wasn't something I'd ever considered I just kind of assumed like hey you got to be like a mega genius to do that stuff it's way too hard I'd never be able to do it and I really like the design side I want to make you know characters and classes and stories and enemies and set up these big giant fights that people can battle in and get together with and have friends and you know I really wanted to do MMO design specifically so I went in for an interview oh goodness I don't remember when it was a long long time ago though I went for a game design interview that went actually pretty well I thought I don't know I could have been completely naive and crazy and it was terrible but it seemed like it went great and I thought hey no this is it I'm gonna maybe become a game designer I flew I remember I flew down to Las Vegas to go to this game design interview that was at an event went great and they're like hey we're gonna call you next week and talk to you a little bit about it and I never heard back it was like how what happened like why I didn't get a callback Annalee email the guy paying him and stuff later I found out that almost immediately after that he'll the guy that I'd been talking to left the company went somewhere else so I don't know if it was accidental and just you know got dropped because they things change and you know if you leave a company you don't really care about get hiring people for the other one or if I just totally bombed it and thought I had done much better so my first game design interview like said what great but I did not get the job after that I decided well I'm gonna try a little bit more programming stuff and I went into just software that was not for games I was still programming little game things for myself little game tools but not really actually doing game development or anything and well long story short that little bit of programming accidentally also led me into a game programming job doing game tools and things kind of snowballed from there and I really didn't know it at the time but game programming was kind of perfect for me because it allowed me to do a lot of things that I never could have been able to do as a game designer and it gave me a lot of flexibility and also really played to strengths that I didn't realize I had until I kind of fell into the position of hey you got to make these things work figure it out so let me talk real briefly though about what a game programmer does day to day and then I want to talk about what a game designer does so as a programmer there are quite a few things that you need to do depending on the level of programmer that you're at it's gonna vary quite a bit in the specialties and the size of the company for a small little startup company I say you're a team of one to three developers you're gonna be doing all kinds of things you have to start off with a plan for how you're gonna build out the game well how are you going to architect this thing what are you gonna put together what engine are you gonna use what systems are you gonna use how's everything gonna get all tied together you have to code all of these systems of course so you're constantly just writing code in C sharp or C++ depending on the game engine that you're using and you need to be learning about these things all the I'm too you can't just learn how to code once and then be done it's not like a it's not a one and done type skill it's something that you're constantly learning at all good programmers that I know we're learning almost something something new at least every week and often something new every day but a bigger part of what you're doing is working with the game designers and the production team you're taking their ideas and their documents that they've written which we'll talk about in just a minute and you're turning those into actual executing code you're making it so that their vision comes to life on the screen and in a game and is interactable and fun to play you also work with artists a lot now depending on the team size you may or may not work with artists very much you might be a team where you've got art specific programmers and those guys generally work heavily on the graphics side and the art pipeline it's almost like a specialty in a big company and smaller companies again you'll be doing a bit of that as well but you'll do less of it or almost none of it if you're in a giant company where you're working on different systems so one of those other systems I think I should talk about and one of the easiest ways to get into game programming is doing tools development which is actually how I started off actually started doing QA tools then moved into design tools and then moved into design and game or not resign but gameplay stuff so building tools is it's pretty interesting and it's a lot of fun and it's relatively easy to do for a new programmer what you're doing is setting up systems or specific little applications so that the game designers can take their ideas and turn that into data that's either stored in the game or in a database or in some file somewhere a lot of time this would be like text files or a sequel or no sequel server it's got a lot of data there sometimes it's just building tools that are like in editor tools if you use a Unity a lot you'd be building custom unity editors tools like that so that the designers can go in and do their job efficiently and remember that the designers are not gonna be programmers they're not going to be looking at the code and they're gonna want a nice simple fast interface and that's kind of the key thing as a tool builder or tool developer you want to build stuff that makes it so that designers can work really really fast making designers fast is really part of your job as a tool developer you want to make it so that the game can get finished it's a undervalued I'd say an underrated game development job that actually is extremely important and something that is like said relatively easy to get into because most game programmers aren't super interested in tools development the other thing you can do as well there's graphics there's tools the other biggest thing that you'll see often is game play programming and that's when you're putting together all of the systems and just building the code for the game making it so that you know you move around and stuff animates and characters jump and input works and game systems work in combat works you're doing all of the I would say more fun and more exciting stuff I know some people really love the graphic stuff some people really love tool stuff I really love gameplay things because I get to make it so that the designers ideas of how this thing is gonna work actually happens and players can play it so let's talk a little bit about designers what is a game designer do day-to-day it's actually very very very different it's nothing like being a programmer game designers generally talk a lot and they write a lot so they're working with other game designers often to brainstorm out ideas and figure out a general system or flow of how they want things to work and how they want systems to interact but they're also a lot alone just writing documentation for these ideas they also need to do a ton of playing games and experimenting to be honestly if you really love playing all kinds of different games and you're like a game addict that wants to go out and try everything you know you want to play every different game and you really like seeing all of the differences between the games and you can explain why one game is slightly better than the other because of a certain grab system game design might be kind of perfect for you because that's the that's the job right the job is understanding what's out there understanding what's fun and then figuring out how to make the fun appear in the game that you're building on I mean really that's the job of a game designer is to make the game fun but there are a lot of other floral day-to-day things that you're like communicating with the art team right if you're designing things you're generally coming up with a rough concept of what it is you're not drawing the things out but you might be thinking like hey these are maybe this is a dinosaur game and these are the types of dinosaurs that we want we want something that's kind of like a pterodactyl but has six extra legs or tentacles or something and you're working with the artists to get concepts done and then get the final art looking how you expect it to look so that the world kind of blends together of course you're working with artists a lot on the art style and they have a lot of input and direction on it but you're still coming up with the core things that are actually in the game so you're designing what the objects are what the levels are what characters are you're also implementing some of that stuff so as a base level think of level design you have to create levels might be drawing out maps on paper or on a computer at first and then they're getting put into the game by artists or by designers sometimes and they're just building up these levels but not just like the base level all of the things in the level so you're putting down all of the props a lot of the time you're putting in the particle systems that are there the fire that's at every single barrel you're doing a lot of the I would say almost like the grunt work but it's not really grunt work for game designers they tend to love it and they do a really good job at it and these are things that I personally as a programmer and pretty bad at and I'd say most programmers are bad at it if you watch a program or design a level and then you send in a good game designer to do a little bit of work on the level it looks like you know you went from kindergarten to college the difference in quality is just dramatic of course you can get the same kind of thing with an artist the artist can do great level design as well but usually designers are the best at it because they'll come up with not just visuals that look really pretty but they're thinking about exactly how the game's gonna flow where the player is gonna move what their view is gonna look like from every angle so they're like hey if I go around this corner what am I actually seeing when I look back out because that's an important thing to make the game all cohesive and entertaining there could also be doing implementation like just creating tons and tons of enemies and NP CAES or tweaking damaged values you know if you're building a mobile they're designing the new characters that are coming out and thinking about all of the interactions between that character and the existing ones doing the balance changes that need to be done and really mainly their job is just to make the game fun it's not an easy job don't get me wrong like it's it sounds like an easy job it sounds like a fun job I think it is a probably a very fun job but doing game design well is not easy anybody can do game design most people can't do it well I can do game design I am NOT a good game designer I've been working in the industry for a very long time I think that a lot of people think that just because they play games though that game design is going to be easy for them and I think that for some subset it will be but most people really underestimate the amount of energy and skill and effort that really goes into being a good game designer and it's a number one get lots of experience understand the markets understand what the games are out there and what makes them fun if you don't know what makes the games fun it can be a lot harder to reproduce that in fact if you're still watching I'm gonna put a link to the game designs and podcast I think that's a good introduction into how to make games fun and kind of how that all flows together so just look for that down in the comments below and if you're interested in more game design stuff too let me know I'll talk about it maybe even get some game designers on here to explain what it's like a little bit more so now I want to talk about some of the benefits of game design versus programming because they're both great jobs I think and I think that it's a blast to be in either one of them but there are some real differences in how they work and what the ups and downs of them are so if you're a game designer I think that the biggest benefits are that it's just a lot of fun right you're going in unless you're doing minor tweaks and adjustments or a lot of grunt work like making thousands and thousands of recipes because the tools were too hard to use to make it automatic it can be a blast right you're just going in and coming up with all these crazy ideas and then somebody makes them real or you're helping make them real yourself the other real big benefit is that game designers tend to be the ones that get really famous and popular right like you go to a gaming convention it's the game designer you know if it's up there in the front talking there everybody's all excited about their awesome ideas and it's because they're generally good outgoing people that are a lot of fun to interact with and they have really cool ideas and people want to pick their brain and they well designed and came up with the idea that everybody thought was fun there are probably some other benefits to game design I'm not really sure what what else to list though I can't think of a whole lot other than it's just a blast in yeah it seems like a lot of fun you also I guess don't have to code right like you don't need to necessarily know how to code you don't need any of that stuff and they'd say it's probably it's it's really just you're applying the skills of the thing that you love to do playing games let's talk about the benefits of programming though and why I recommend programming to anybody who I think it's a good fit for it if they can do it I recommend it the first one is very very obvious which is that game programmers tend to get paid more I would say on average you'll probably start at double the pay rate just as a new new developer from what I've seen that could vary of course some companies it's gonna dramatically vary and it's gonna level out a bit more at the top level but I'm starting off as a game programmer you're gonna make a lot more than you will as a game designer if you just look at the jobs and the intro salaries you'll see that that they're quite a bit higher and if you're interested by the way and um jobs or just the pay for programming stuff I was thinking about doing a video about that too so just drop a comment let me know and if there are enough of them I'll do that just on how game developers actually make money and how much money they actually make it's also easier to get a job though so as a game designer going in it's very hard if you don't have experience to show that you know how to do game design and there are a ton of people applying for every game design job there dozens are probably hundreds of applicants and it's because everybody that plays a game like said they all think that they should be the game designer they all have ideas and everybody wants to share their ideas there's nothing wrong with that but there's a lot more competent they're way less people applying for programming jobs and there's still a good number but it's nowhere near the rate that you're gonna see for game design so programming is much easier to get into and especially if you go in through tools if you just look for tools jobs and you kind of get a little bit of experience just so that you can do the job it's much easier to just get into the the industry and get into a company there and personally I also find it a lot easier to evaluate your own skills as a programmer or to have your skills evaluated I think that with design it's very very subjective and it's hard to tell if you're doing good or getting better at least for me and as a programmer I find it very easy because as you get better as a programmer things just become dramatically easier you're doing the same thing and it's no longer confusing it's nice and simple and easy with design I think it's a little bit harder because you have to know whether or not it's fun and you have to get other people's feedback and whether or not it's fun it's good to get other people's feedback in programming but I think you can self evaluate and self learn quite a bit more you can also do some other things that you just can't do as a game designer like build your own games if you want to design a game and maybe your designer and you have this idea for a game you generally have to find somebody to program it you're not gonna be able to build it yourself some designers can do it very very very few and most of the time they're really struggle with it if you're a programmer who has some design ideas and you want to build that out you can do it relatively easily and probably pretty quickly especially if you have an idea that you just want a prototype out you got like hey I think that this would be a really fun concept I want to prototype it out I'm not even worried about art you can build that really really fast and you can just kind of make your ideas appear on the screen and share them much easier than you can as a designer which is really one of my favorite things cuz I just come up with an idea and I'm like hey I want to make this happen I know hey I could do that whenever I want if I want to make this little game or this thing I can do that whether or not it'll be fun no idea okay probably not and know usually what I'll do is I'll build them I'll get it kind of working then I go hey game designer buddy um can you tell me how to make this not suck and make it fun and then they just come in with a flurry of ideas that are great and fix things up and make stuff a lot better but there's one other thing I think that is important to talk about here with programming as a benefit and that's that even outside of game development if you can build games if you can code games you can get a job doing other programming and it'll it might pay more a lot of the time it does sometimes it doesn't though there are plenty of game to have jobs that pay well like I said if you're interested in that drop comment and I'll talk more about it later but you can get jobs outside of the game industry just working on general software you can work on enterprise stuff you can work on web stuff you can work on just about any kind of code because once you get into the mindset of programming it's not very hard to make a switch and if you're doing game programming and you make a switch out of game programming you'd be surprised how much simpler it is people talk about game dev like it some like it's an easy thing sometimes but it's dramatically harder than regular programming I'd say every time I've done the switch and I've gone back and forth multiple times to like hey I don't know I don't maybe I want to try non game stuff for a little while every single time I went from like this is fun interesting challenging to this is extremely easy like this is so easy that like it's almost autopilot and I can just go do game stuff on the side in my spare time because I don't have to think too much about the enterprise stuff and I think that a lot of that is just because the constraints most of the time are dramatically lower than when you're working on a game in a game you have to be high-performance you have to be bug free and one that just bug free but you have to ship constantly with good releases you can't you can't just auto update wait good but you'll lose players right with an enterprise thing it's very easy to go through and iterate and just really it's not even about that it's mostly just that the code is much much simpler the problems that you're solving are much simpler and they generally tend to be in isolation where in games everything is working together and all these systems are tied together and it gets much more confusing of course I'm sure there are plenty of it really advanced really confusing and complicated enterprise and web jobs out there don't get me wrong I know that they exist but the majority of them are very very very simple if you can do game programming you can easily do I'd say probably 90% of other programming jobs with just a little bit of training on maybe the language and the systems that they're using so it's a big benefit of if something goes wrong you have an easy safe fallback now that said I would recommend just staying in game development and don't just try to jump over to non game stuff because it's really just a lot more fun a lot more rewarding and those are the two biggest things that I think are important you should enjoy your job and it should be something that you're proud of and happy to do and not something that you dread or don't want to go to you if you ever find yourself in that situation where you're like hey I don't want to go to work anymore this sucks I'm not gonna go to work today try being a game programmer get into it get used to it and if you're in that position as a game programmer and you hate it find a new company that you like working at find a new project and enjoy it because game programming you're making stuff to make other people happy and let other people have fun you should do the same while you're at it anyway I'm gonna shut up now if you have questions about this stuff though or like said if you're interested in the pay side of this stuff just let me know drop a comment hit the share button like it and all that stuff and also almost forgot I wanted to say thanks to everybody on patreon I'm gonna put something special up there soon it's been a little while anyway thanks again goodbye you

Channel: Jason Weimann

Views: 720,089

Keywords: game design, game code, game programming, unity, unity3d, unreal engine 4, game dev, game development, indie game devlog, game devlog, unity3d college, sykoo, game developer, how to make games, gaming industry, unity 3d, unity tutorial, unity 3d tutorials for beginners, unity beginner tutorial, how to make a game, devlog, unity devlog, indie devlog, game dev log, gamedev, indie game dev log, making games, quill18, blackthornprod, thomas brush, video games

Id: _7qgvNOTfdQ

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019