What should my Major be?

[Siberianhusky89]

Originally Posted by Liz England

You are talking about the person who writes the GDD - the Game Design Document - which contains the overall vision of the game and sets down the rules, systems, and mechanics.

There is no game designer position where all you do is write documentation. Writing a GDD is not a full-time position. You also have to do other things - like create game content.



The publisher does this, not the developer.



You are correct in that programmers implement the game via code. You are incorrect to think that designers just sit around designing and tell other people to implement. Why would games have teams of designers if all they did was document and tell others what to do? Designers spend most of their time implementing the game through things like levels, missions, story writing, and balancing systems. There is a lot of work that goes into a game that is done outside of programming and art.

I never stated that they just sit around and tell them what to do. They have to write documents in order for them to understand and think of the different methods within the game.

[Liz England]

Originally Posted by Siberianhusky89

I never stated that they just sit around and tell them what to do. They have to write documents in order for them to understand and think of the different methods within the game.

But that's the point. Writing a document and giving it to someone IS telling them what to do, which is but a part-time job description. There's no full-time job that does this. Thinking and documenting is not a full-time job. They also either manager people (very different skill from designing) or implement parts of the game, and often do both.

[ndimucci]

You should major in something that teaches you a marketable skill so you can easily land a job with decent pay if and when game design doesn't work out anymore.

[bob]

Where is Tom Sloper? Why hasn't he thrown in a link here?

My advice to you - go to this website and read a couple lessons. Not the Gospel, but pretty insightful stuff.

Here's one about choosing what to study:
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson40.htm

[tsloper]

Originally Posted by bob

Where is Tom Sloper? Why hasn't he thrown in a link here?

Because the last post in this thread was written in February, maybe??

[bob]

Not true - someone else responded to it before me! It was on the first page of threads. I didn't notice any of the dates though. That's weird.