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Today Chris Mcoy, a designer at Codemasters, came into the University of Bolton to give us a talk about the roles within Game Development and what we can do to boost ourselves onto the career ladder. He specifically went into detail on the various roles and what their role entails, this was of great interest to me and I have decided to write my report on this topic.

I am going to talk about Production first. The job of production is to shelter the rest of the team from the management and to take the brunt of the complaints. The production are the ones who have to made the tough decisions to drop parts of the game or to prioritise certain features over others who are deemed as more important.

Designers are the communicators, taking the ideas and combining them into a coherent game that the rest of the team can create. They are also responsible for creating the flow diagrams and wireframes that will be used to help describe the game to the other team members. It is important for Designers to have knowledge of other disciplines so they know what each team is capable of and who needs to do which tasks. Designers are not the people in charge nor are they the visionary for the project.

Next there are the artists who are responsible for making the art for the game, Artists have Style Guides which depict what the game will look like so that each artist has the same vision for the game and adhere to the style. As an artist you are not the artist, you have to work with the other members of the art team.

After the Artists we have the Coders who are the creators of everything, making it work. Coders are not the 'code monkeys' and are not Dr no's who constantly put down any and all ideas. Coders need to have knowledge in multiple languages and Maths. It is the coders job to see the problems and to find solutions and when there is no solution they have to go back to the designers and find another way around.

Finally we have the QA guys whose job it is to give feedback to to the other teams when bugs or glitches are found within the game. QA is not just a stepping stone role that people use to get into industry and they are not just servants that do whatever the other roles ask them to do.