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Concept / Storyboard Artists flesh out the game with sketches and paintings of characters, levels, vehicles, and other elements in a game. This will give an early feel for the game. Character artists as well as level designers much of the time fill this role.

Character Artists & Animators work with 3D programs such as Maya or 3DS Max to produce the characters and objects that make up the video games.

Level Designers are given sections or levels of the game, creating the environments that the player will interact in. They will have a huge impact on whether the game will have the look and feel of what the design team had envisioned.

Texture Artists give the skins to levels and characters. They have to make sure the textures are properly mapped onto the 3D objects and backgrounds in a convincing and seamless way.

Programmers work on the video game engine, AI, and anything pretty much that will make the game run. C++ is the programming language of choice for most game programming.

Sound / Audio: There will be people working on the sound effects of the game, as well as the music that often is playing in the background.

Professional Testers are often employed, another video game career. These people put in long hours to find bugs and other potential problems.

Artificial Intelligence today it is almost impossible to write professional style games without using at least some aspects of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a useful tool to use to help to create characters that have a choice of responses to games player's actions, but have to be able to act in a fairly unpredictable fashion.

Motion Capture Technology Motion capture technology is a good example of how digital techniques are being applied to the video game (and related) industries to allow more convincing visualizations of imaginary or composite images.

Video Game Programming Languages

If you are interested in a career in video game programming, you will probably find yourself needing to think about both video game design and video game programming in terms of in-depth knowledge of at least one of the following programming languages:

* Visual Basic. This is a high level language and relatively easy to learn, and is good for turn-based games such as war games and board games. It's advantages are that it can handle both the scene graphics and the game processing.
* Java. This is good at handling motion, and its object orientation means that character movement and other speed graphics are easy. It also is good at handling distributed processing over the Internet. It is not difficult to learn, and is becoming more popular for interactive games.
* C++. This is the de-facto standard for games programming, and it handles objects and graphics at speed, as it is a processor based language. However the learning curve for being able to program well and with the sophistication necessary for good games programming is steep, so experience counts with C++

Your video game design often dictates the video game programming language, so many programmers work with all three languages, taking advantage of the best of each.

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