Game designers come in many different forms of personalities. Besides obvious personality differences there are three traits that stand out from the rest that you must have to make it in this industry. One of those traits is your artistic ability. You must be able to take a concept from either a simple or elaborate 2D drawing and turn it into a 3D work of art. Then you need to decide where that game asset will go inside the game. Will it look good over by the rocks and trees you modeled or will it negatively effect the gameplay? As a game designer, you should be able to go from concept to a finished product and be able to build the world inside the game in a way that offers the player the most interactive experience possible.

Another excellent trait to have as a game artist or designer is to be highly analytical. Analyze every polygon and vertice on your game asset to make sure the content you’re creating, is the best and most efficient it can possibly be. Analyze the layout of the level you’re helping to create by testing the game over and over again until you’ve made sure what you have created is seamless and bug-free. Without being analytical, developers would ship sub-par games to the public and would most likely give their company a bad reputation. If it’s not done right the first time, why do it at all?

The final trait every game artist and designer should posses is a detailed imagination. How many games have you played where you felt like you had played that same game before but it just had a different name? There are so many games that are similar to one another and it doesn’t make sense to keep creating the same game based off of the same kind of idea. The game industry needs people that think outside of the box in order to move forward into the future generation of games. Some ideas can be far fetched and downplayed as “impossible.” But with technology consistently increasing each year, sometimes an idea thought to be too crazy a few years back may actually be possible tomorrow.

All in all, a game designer/artist needs to specialize in a certain area of game design but also be a well rounded individual. You need desire and determination to come into work each day and work long, hard hours. You need the commitment to follow through on your responsibilities within the company that you signed onto. There is a word that gets thrown around loosely in the industry and that word is “passion.” A game designer or artist needs to have a passion for what they do. Anyone can come in to a job interview and say, “hire me because this is my passion.. this is what I do. I love what I do.” Of course you have a passion for it but passion will only get you so far. If there is a game designer that gets hired and doesn’t have passion for their job, then they’re in the wrong business. A successful game designer or artist will take that passion and turn their ideas into reality. Make it happen!