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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.

The Video Game Tester

Getting a game tester job is not necessarily very easy. The prime qualifications for the job is the ability to be a qualify video games player, because you have to play at every level, and use as many pathways in as many different combinations as possible.

A video game tester will have to be able to demonstrate their ability to play to high standards, and they also have to be able to use other software well, including Microsoft office products and have some knowledge of Windows and other operating systems used in games. They have to be able to communicate well both aurally and in written communications, as they have to be able to explain situations to the video games team for whom they are testing.

A video game tester will also have to be tenacious as they need to test a game long and hard, and they have to be innovative to be able to test unlikely combinations of pathways. There is considerable competition for every game tester job, as for some people playing video games is a major obsession. If you are interested in a game tester job, be sure that you have the necessary communications skills and can organize yourself and be disciplined enough to test the games, rather than simply playing them.

Salaries for video game testers depends on experience and where you work. In the first few years, you can expect to get on average around $30,000, with an increase to $40,000+ with 4 years or so of experience under your belt. They won't just take anyone though, so don't think this is easy.


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