Team Structure

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Overview

When digital games were first commercialized in the 1970s, one person, with a decent knowledge of programming, could create the entire product. That person would act as game designer, producer, programmer, and even graphic artist and sound designer. A finished game averaged only eight kilobytes or less in size; onscreen characters were represented by jagged blocks of pixels, and sound effects consisted of generic “beeps” or “bonks” generated from the sound card. To give you a sense of the state of the art, the arcade classic, Space Invaders from 1978, was four kilobytes in size, including all art and sound. Asteroids, released in 1979, was eight kilobytes in total, and Pac-Man, released in 1982, was 28 kilobytes.

As PCs and game console hardware have become more powerful, the size and complexity of the games on these platforms have grown exponentially. The amount of art and audio that can be incorporated into games has surpassed and now dwarfs the computer code. Today’s titles take up hundreds of megabytes of storage, with their overall production values fast approaching that of TV and movies. Elaborate visual effects, sound effects, music, voice acting and animation are all standard fare in today’s games. Some, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation or Enter the Matrix, rely on the voices and 3D models of wellknown television and film actors to give life to game characters, while others like Medal of Honor, set their epic cinematic game scenes with music performed by live orchestras.

Along with this rise in production values has come the need for much larger teams composed of people from many different backgrounds. From database programmers to interface designers and 3D graphic artists, game teams are becoming increasingly composed of a wide range of specialized talent. In this chapter, we’ll look at the roles of each of these types of individuals, and how the game designer fits into the team structure.

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