People in Your Neighborhood

This article is intended to help new game designers understand the relationships that exist within a game development studio so they can honor those relationships in the most effective way possible.

Design managers can refer new designers to this this article to help them get an idea of their working relationships. You are also welcome to take this text and customize it for your specific studio setup.

You can be a great game designer and produce some solid work on your own, but working together with your teammates in the studio will ultimately create a better game in a more efficient way.

These are some of the most common relationships you’ll encounter as a game designer:

• Producers
• Community Team
• Software Engineers
• QA – Quality Assurance
• CS – Customer Service
• Animators
• 3D Modelers / 3D Artists
• VFX – Visual Effects
• SFX – Sound Effects
• Level Designers
• Environment Art
• UI Team – User Interface
• 2D Artists / Graphic Design / Illustration
• Marketing / PR
• The Players

Producers

Next to your fellow design team members, you’ll likely interact most often with producers. The relationship between design and production is one of the most critical in the company. It’s a complex relationship that requires mutual respect, trust and responsibility.

The production department is the central hub of the development studio. Ideally, everything significant that happens within the studio is known by the production team and is made better because of their involvement.

The most successful studios have producers that will do anything to ensure a game is delivered on time with great quality. I’ve experienced producers from studios like Riot or Blizzard or WoTC that will do everything from setting up a super-sophisticated development tracking process to something as simple as driving an artist to work whose car had broken down during a tight deadline crunch.

I will get into some specific methods of design and production partnering in future articles, but here are some quick tips for new game designers working with producers:

• When you start work as a designer at a new studio, meet with the producer that’s assigned to your area of design. Ask how processes work and how you can minimize problems and be as efficient as possible within the studio’s development process.

• Find out how the communication chain is set up. What type of communication tools does the studio use besides email? What types of communication does the producer want to be involved with and what do they not want to be involved with?

• Generally, a producer will want to know if anything happens that affects key milestones, including design spec finalization, handoff to QA, internal testing schedule, and so on. A great producer will also want to know anytime they can help you be more successful, so don’t be afraid to ask for help.

• Ask your producer what scheduling  or development tools you will be responsible for updating. Some studios have designers directly interact with scheduling software; other studios prefer to have the producers be responsible for those types of tasks.

• If you need to work with someone from another team on a specific design issue, ask your producer if they can identify the correct person to work with and/or facilitate an introduction.

Community Team

Most studios today have dedicated community managers, forum moderators and, sometimes, Esports managers.

As a game designer, you can gain a ton of insight by working closely with members of the community team. You can also increase player happiness and engagement by having strong channels of communication go out to the players.

Working closely with the community team is an important issue that sometimes goes overlooked within a studio. I’ll be dedicating an article on the topic of the game designer/community manager relationship, but for now here are some quick hits on how you, as a designer, can best interact with the community team:

• Ask the community team to provide detailed updates on hot topics, at the minimum on a weekly basis. Ask them to provide as much detail as possible, along with their personal opinions on what would be best for the community. This feedback should be carefully considered and should influence design priorities and decisions in a responsible way.

• Whenever a patch is being prepared, designers should carefully review the patch notes and clarify anything that isn’t obvious or 100% correct. Look for anything that somehow got missed by the change tracking process. In large studios with 100+ people making changes of all kinds, it’s easy to miss some minor UI changes, balance changes or bug fixes that affect the player experience.

• Proactively ask the community team for feedback on features, both during the initial design phase and once design is underway. Good community managers will be sensitive to controversial issues and can help you consider changes before a design is in the final stages.

• Keep the community team in the loop. As an avid consumer of games from every major company, it’s obvious which studios keep their community team “in the loop” and which ones don’t. Be the former – keep the community team well informed so they can speak intelligently about issues and maintain credibility with players. The community team will need to use that credibility at some point in the future when they announce bad news, so help them start earning it and banking it now.

• Be extremely responsive if a community manager brings up a time-sensitive issue that concerns your area of design. Offer to provide written explanations, appear on Twitch Q&A chats, or whatever else the community manager believes will be helpful for the player base.

Software Engineering

Software engineers make everything about the game work and are pretty much the most essential part of any development studio. For decades, the only things you needed to create a “video game” were an engineer and an idea.

Today, engineers have the enormously complex job of not only coding the game, but also keeping many systems working together as the game evolves, fixing bugs that can be elusive, and growing the game over time. They ensure that code runs as efficiently as possible, often across multiple platforms.

A designer will need to develop a strong relationship with the engineering team. Appreciate these men and women, because you are nothing without them.

The engineering team has an impact on game design and game features in several ways:

• Engineers will often implement features from your design specs. This will require you to develop very specific and detailed specs for anything you plan to hand off to engineering. I’ll write an article dedicated to creating game design specs that will be appreciated by everyone in the studio who needs to work from it.

• Fix existing features that aren’t working properly. This type of work can be easy – a quick fix that’s easy to spot – or incredibly difficult and time consuming. Prioritizing fixes is something that is the joint responsibility of design, engineering and production. We will go over that process and prioritization philosophy with a future dedicated article.

• Evolving and making improvements to existing features. Example: You may launch with a player inventory system that quickly becomes obsolete once players start collecting tons of loot; so you iterate on the design of the system and create a design spec for engineering to implement.

• Creating tools for designers to implement design content. Example: It’s more efficient for an engineer to spend a month creating a tool that allows a designer to create quests than having an engineer spend a week coding each quest you design for the lifespan of the game.

Tips for successful interaction with software engineers:

• Like everyone in the studio, engineers will have solid design ideas and should be encouraged to share them. Because engineers are often implementing designs, they are likely to have smart, practical suggestions for improving them. Some of the coolest design ideas have come from engineers in the midst of implementing a new feature. I would regularly get stuff like “Hey Jeff, I want to add color coding to this feature, it will take almost no time and look sweet. Cool with you?”
• When reporting a problem that you know engineering will investigate, be incredibly precise and detailed with your information. Give specific examples of what is currently happening contrasted to what is supposed to be happening. Don’t add any necessary fluff, but provide details with screenshots or videos if possible. You may also involve QA in creating exact steps to reproduce the problem so engineering can estimate the time required to fix it.
• When working with production and engineering to schedule the release of an upcoming feature, people tend to underestimate the amount of design time needed after engineering has finished its groundwork. Most new features will require engineering time to create the backend for the feature which then allows the design team to use the newly-created tech to implement, test and iterate on the design. The last part, iteration and testing, is often underrepresented in development schedules, so stay vigilant and play it safe when you’re in a room with production and engineering estimating release dates of new features.

Note that there are a variety of specific software engineering disciplines, particularly on larger projects. We’ll explore the difference between them and how/when you should deal with them in a future article.

QA (Quality Assurance)

QA testers are a critical component for any game studio. As a designer, you will come to learn that QA will save you from very bad things happening and you’ll be grateful for it.

QA members are often be dedicated players and  have tested and explored elements of the game that many members of the studio aren’t even aware of. They are one of the best resources designer can have to get opinions on designs.

As a game designer, you have a few responsibilities to help QA do their job effectively when testing something of your design:

• Create and maintain a very detailed description of what you’re designing, including hard numbers and exactly how every interaction is supposed to work. Describe every little detail, otherwise QA testers won’t know what to test and what to try and break.

• I recommend keeping everything updated in a wiki or similar resource. There is a joke among designers that nobody reads the wiki, but the exception will be QA – they will read your design wiki if you keep it updated and it will help them ensure everything is working as intended.

• If your game system includes loot or random elements, itemize exact drop rates so QA can test them. Often they will have tools that allow them to simulate millions of “drops” to ensure everything is working as it should. If they don’t have that tool, talk to the QA lead and the production department about creating one.

• Work with QA (and usually Production) to create a test plan for new features. The designer who speced out a feature and the designer who implemented a feature (if they are different people) should always work on test plans for that feature – don’t just leave it to QA to determine what needs to be tested, help them out.

• Encourage QA testers to not just provide objective feedback on bugs and unintended design issues, but also provide subjective feedback. The QA team will have useful feedback on how something feels and plays, so take use that resource.

As design positions open up, keep in mind that QA is a fertile ground for hiring into roles in design, production and community. Many of the best development staff at AAA companies started in QA. I really liked to partner with individual QA members on specific projects and give them a bit of responsibility outside of their normal job duties, with permission from their manager. This allows them to get design experience on their resume and learn about the design systems and philosophies within the company. They’ll be better positioned when design jobs are available in the future.

CS (Customer Service)

An astute game designer will have interaction with customer service at some level. CS is one of the front line soldiers for the game. Just like the community team, the soldiers of CS are able to have unique perspectives on customer/player needs.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to working with CS:

• If the customer service team publishes regular reports about hot issues, ask to receive those reports. As a designer, you will find issues that affect you current or future designs.

Example: Customers may be writing to CS with complaints that rewards from a certain mission are not what they expect. You may realize that the text you wrote explaining the mission reward is too vague or confusing.

Example: An item designer may read reports that players aren’t getting a specific item of loot from a raid boss. Even though the loot table was tested thoroughly before launch, you may find some issue that caused the loot to drop at lower rates on the live server.

• Any lack of clarity within a game system can be brutal on customer service and create a ton of player tickets for them to deal with. It doesn’t hurt to get opinions from someone in CS about upcoming game features, including their in-game descriptions, to see if any issues can be avoided before launch.

• If you see a hot issue that keeps coming up through customer service, talk with production and/or design management to get a fix for it added to the release schedule. Some issues can be resolved with a simple text change or minor design adjustment that can be squeezed into the next patch, while major issues may need to be prioritized and go into the release schedule for much farther down the line.

Animators

Animators create the animation or movement of characters within a game. This could be a Titan executing a Fist of Havoc in Destiny, the Punisher firing his M60 in Marvel Heroes, or Drones in Halo seamlessly flying, landing, moving and attacking.

Game designers who work on character powers, enemies, NPCs and sometimes items or vehicles will work with an animator during the design process.

Working with animation comes after a designer has mapped out what they expect from a specific power or action, but before VFX and SFX are applied.

When working with the animation team, a designer must have extremely detailed specifications for what they need. Animations are very precise when it comes to timing.

Here are the pieces of information an animator will expect from you as a designer:

• The exact timing of the action that you are designing.

Example: From a resting state, the character’s hand should touch their belt and throw a grenade, then return to their neutral state. The grenade should leave the character’s hand 900 milliseconds after the ability is triggered.

Example: I would like a spinning attack, with Elektra executing a spin kick and striking once with each of her Sai. Total time from start to finish should be 1200 milliseconds.

• An animator may come back to you and negotiate changing the length of an attack or action to make it look better. Example: “Hey dude, can we make Elektra’s spin/sai attack last a full 1500 milliseconds, I can make it look a lot more realistic?”  As a designer you can work it out with the animator and change the damage/effectiveness of an attack if needed.

• Share any inspiration for a animation. You may really like a specific move from the sword fight in Kill Bill or a specific gun fight from Heat and want to work that into the game. Let the animation team know that you want to draw inspiration from that and they’ll work it out with you. Experienced animators are also a wealth of information when it comes to cool moves and will often be able to suggest a ton of incredible reference material, so let them know what you want to know and see what they suggest.

• When requesting moves from an animator, you will also need to supply details about the area of effect of an attack. If you are designing a melee attack that has does a cone of AOE damage or a wide diameter circle of damage, let them know so the animation can reflect that. Between animation and VFX, you want to make sure players can see exactly what they are affecting with an ability.

3D Modelers / 3D Artists

If you’re responsible for designing a new enemy, a new set of armor for a character, a new NPC, or even a new type of weapon, you will probably need to work with a 3D artist / 3D modeler. They may also be known as a character designer at your studio.

You can help these artists by considering the following:

• Is there any reference material that you want incorporated into the artist’s work? Perhaps you want an enemy that is inspired by Lou Gosset in Enemy Mine or a six-legged centaur with triple gatling lasers mounted on its back. In any event, the art director of the project will generally ensure that the direction for the character is lore appropriate and epic, but you should share any thoughts you have for the design.

• If you’re designing for a shooter or action game, enemies may have weak spots that you want to reference on their character model. If a big boss has a backpack critical spot, you will want to work with the 3D modeler to make sure it looks appropriately vital. You may want to ask VFX to get involved further down the line to add a glow or some visual representation of the weak spot or, even better, have the character model adjust when the weak spot is attacked.

• A great example are the “Cleaners” from The Division that lug around fuel tanks that ignite and eventually explode when they take enough hits –  it’s the perfect example of enemy design, character model, VFX and SFX working together. Use that as a minimum bar for your work.

• Is the model part of a group or series? A practical and efficient design strategy that you will probably use sometime in your design career is creating a hierarchy of enemies with similar character models. The idea is to use a similar base character, but apply different weapons, abilities, armor or coloring to add some variety. Great examples are soldiers that you see in almost every FPS. One soldier has a grenade launcher and slightly different accessories, but uses most of the same tech as a fellow soldier with a pair of goggles, sonic shotgun and laser chucks. This technique saves a ton of development time since you’re using similar 3D models, animation, VFX, SFX, rigging, lighting and other resources.

A final thought – If you’re designing a playable character or a character costume, consider having the 3D artist create a few variant designs simultaneously. Having the artist create these variations while the design is fresh in their mind is an efficient way to have some content for the future, to be used as players rewards, holiday items, store content or promotional giveaways.

VFX – Visual Effects

Visual effects artists create some high-profile elements of modern games, including:

• Enemy and character attack and ability effects. Example: The “flame on” effects and fiery hammers of a Sunbreaker Titan from Destiny.

• Persistent visuals that are not part of a character model, but could be elements of a weapon, item, attachment, and so on. Example: The glowing shield that Reinhardt carries in Overwatch.

• Visual effects used to highlight an in-game event, such as leveling up, completing an achievement, opening a sweet treasure chest, and so on.

As a game designer, working with VFX artists is very similar to working with the animation team; before FX work starts you want to be prepared with extremely specific about details of your designs, including:

• Duration: Precisely how long an effect needs to play.

• Area: Exact area of an effect, in all three dimensions if appropriate for your game.

• Context: The design intent of the effect, what is it communicating and how pronounced should it be?

• Details: Any preferred colors, opacity, smoke, blur, after-effects, and so on.

• Variations: Any randomized elements included in the design will need to be identified. Example: You may create a fun holiday item that creates a random spooky ghost, chosen from 5 different ghost visuals. Deciding ahead of time will allow the FX designers to plan out and create each variation efficiently.

Iteration will always be needed when working on visual design elements and is often the difference between a good game and a great game; but keep in mind that even a small change to a visual will require a VFX artist to reopen the files, make the adjustments, ensure it doesn’t mess up the animation, ensure it doesn’t mess up the SFX, test the changes, save the files, then have the revised files go through the normal QA process.

Something may seem like a “five minute change”, but it will often end up taking hours of work, so be prepared as much as possible ahead of time. The old adage, “measure twice and cut once” applies to any kind of FX work.

SFX – Sound Effects

Studios will usually have a team of people working on a variety of game elements that fall under the category of “sound”. This is a fairly broad discipline and can cover these areas:

The Game’s Score (Soundtrack): This is usually handled by a composer or experienced music director. Sometimes this work is contracted outside the studio. As a designer, you probably won’t often have direct influence on this area of sound design, however raid designers should coordinate with the sound team to discuss the type of background music and tempo of the music during a specific raid, dungeon or game zone.

Enemy SFX: If you are working on enemy design, you’ll want to work closely with the SFX team to ensure perfect coordination between the types of sounds enemies make and the types of attacks or actions the enemies are performing. This can make the difference between a good or great enemy encounter. You want certain attack to feel impactful and threatening, particularly when dealing with major enemies, raid bosses, and so on.

Player Ability Sounds: You want to ensure ability sounds have the appropriate level of impact and duration. This includes UI sounds, such as equipping items, firing weapons, reloading, interacting with terrain, sprinting, getting tired, building a campfire, cooking some chili, drinking a cold beverage, sleeping, being awoken to a pack of dire wolves, fighting the wolves, skinning the wolves, using their fur to create a pair of sweet boots, inventing Uggs, becoming rich, moving to New York, meeting Donald Trump, eating at Bubba Gump Shrimp in Times Square and finally passing out to reruns of Law and Order in your hotel run. All of that needs SFX.

Voice-Over Dialogue: VO work is usually done by professional voice actors, sometimes union or non-union depending on the studio. The scripts will usually be written by an in-house narrative designer or writer and the SFX team or a sound engineer will handle the infrastructure that allows designers to connect a specific VO line to an in-game action. Writing this dialogue has a ton of dos and don’ts and will be a topic for a future article.

SFX volume: In-game testing will often reveal the initial volume of a sound effect is too low or too high for its intended role in the game. Ensure no sound effect or dialogue is too loud that it’s annoying or too soft that it’s difficult to understand. Some sound effects should be intentionally subdued, like refilling your ammo or an ability coming off cooldown. Notify the sound team of any changes you’d like to make.

Level Designers

Level designers create the raw layouts for zones, raids, PVP maps, and so on. At a larger studio, a level designer will create the white box layout for an area and then an environment artist will make it look appropriately beautiful or horrible.

You will work with level designers when working on raids, zone creation, PvP maps and “dungeons.” Creating a layout for a raid or other zone is an extremely collaborative design process which will require a lot of planning, testing and iteration. As a designer, you may design a raid encounter with some specific ideas on the layout of the area, but a good level designer might give you a dozen interesting new options to make the play space even more interesting. 

I’ll go into detail in future articles on raid design, quest zone design and PvP map design.

Environment Art

Environment artists create the scenery of levels and zones within the game. They make a city look like a city or a dungeon look like a dungeon. Their job begins after level design’s job finishes.

Once the skeleton of an area is complete, the environment artist applies the “skin” to make it look good. They may also be responsible for the skybox of a game, or a tech artist may handle that responsibility.

Environment artists will sometimes create “doodads” like crates, rocks, lamp posts, vending machines and other items you can find in a zone within the game – other times a game designer may have that responsibility using design tools available to them.

As a game designer, you may need to work with environment artists in a few situations:

• If you are a designing a raid, you will work closely with one or more environment artists to set up the raid environments. This will occur after you’ve worked with a level designer to finalize the “white box” of the raid and the geometry of the raid has been playtested. You don’t want to jump into the environment art process until you are sure the level design architecture is solid and won’t change. You will want to work with the art director and concept artist to have a solid theme for the raid before the environment artists starts their work.

• If you are designing a quest zone, dungeon, city or PvP map, you will eventually work with an environmental artist as one of the final steps in the process.

• If you are designing an in-game event, you may call upon the services of an environment artist, particularly if it’s a seasonal event that decorates existing zones or adds never encounters. For example, you may ask an environmental artist to add spooky decorations to the social hubs in the game during a Halloween event. Between you, the art director and environment artist, you will work to find something that fits the theme and story of the game world.

UI Team – User Interface

As a game designer, you will find yourself creating game systems that will necessarily include user interface elements within the design. Examples:

• Creating a PvP system carries a heavy UI requirement for elements including game queuing, grouping / team mechanics, scoring, kill recording, end of game stats and persistent stat tracking.

• Creating any kind of quest or mission system will require a carefully considered user interface.

• Any kind of inventory system, vault/stash system or “store” system carries a heavy UI and engineering price.

• An achievement system design should include a user-friendly UI, along with UI elements celebrating success and tracking progress.

• Crafting systems rely on smooth user interface elements.

• Having a central navigation system is an important element for today’s more expansive games and relies heavily on UI. 

• Any kind of skill or talent system will need UI.

• An equipment system or “paper doll” for characters.

• Enemy targeting, enemy (and player) damage indicators.

• Any design feature you create that affects the player HUD will have to go through the UI team and be carefully considered. This is an area of game design that’s been perfected by a few companies and will be addressed in depth in the future.

The UI team will usually be composed of two disciplines: UI Artists and UI Engineers

UI Artists are responsible for creating the look of the UI, the aesthetic components that need to look good and be pleasing to the eye for hours at a time.

UI Engineers actually implement the UI elements, once the design and art needs are completed. This can be simple or incredibly complicated, depending on the feature.

Working with the UI team will usually involve a good amount of iteration and testing to ensure the UI elements associated with your designs are rock solid. The importance of UI cannot be underestimated. It’s one of the most deceptively complicated and difficult parts of game design.

UI team resources are constantly in demand in a studio. To make the most of limited UI time, be prepared with an extremely detailed description of your UI needs, including these details:

• Every possible number, shape, progress bar or graphic element you will need for the UI associated with your design

• The preferred prominence and relative size of the design elements

• The cause and effect of every UI element change detailed precisely. Example: “When an achievement is completed, it will be highlighted with a green border and the completion bar will fill towards the right side of the screen in with the same shade of green, in an amount corresponding to the number of achievement points earned”.

• A wireframe / mock-up of the UI as you see it (don’t worry, a UI artist will only use that as a starting point and do an excellent job configuring it into something great)

2D Artists / Graphic Design / Illustration

Game studios have 2D artists on staff in the form of graphic designers, illustrators, and concept artists. They differ from other types of artist in that they specialize in 2D (flat) art as opposed to 3D models, environment art or visual effects art. There can be, of course, some overlap.

As a game designer, you will often need to include 2D art elements into your designs. This could include:

• Icons for new items, new powers, achievements, quest tracking and so on.
• Background artwork for interface elements.
• Loading screens for a new zone, raid or PvP map
• Concept art for new enemies, weapons, environments or hats.

How to write a request for 2D art:

• Include any relevant reference material, including any in-game objects that have any kind of relationship with the art you are requesting.

• Write a solid art description describing exactly what elements need to be included in the art and where the artist has freedom to improvise. Writing a great art description is an art form itself, which we will cover in detail in a future article.

• Outline exactly how the art will be used in game. Context can be important. Example: “This artwork will be used behind a power selection menu” or “This artwork will be used to decorate a museum in 15th century Spain.”

• Specify the size and resolution that will be needed. There is a huge difference between a 40x40mm power icon and a fully illustrated loading screen.

Marketing / PR

As a designer, you will sometimes need to work with the marketing or PR team to help craft a message about an upcoming patch that contains something you designed.

This will occur when you were responsible for a larger feature and should be the one to create the initial list of “selling points” related to that feature. That list will be massaged and edited by others in the studio – creative director, producers and ultimately the marketing team – but it’s best for the person with first-hand knowledge of the design to start with some details.

For example, if you were the primary designer on an upcoming in-game event, you should list the major features of the event, including:

• Exact start and end times of the event
• Rewards for the event and exactly how to attain them
• Any changes or new content related to the event
• Theming of the event

The final text and marketing materials will look very different from your initial list, but you should ask to do a “final text review” to ensure no incorrect information worked it’s way into the marketing materials during the editing and iteration process.

The Players

The players of your game are your most important design partner. They pay your salary and the salary of every person in your studio. Ultimately they will decide if your game succeeds or fails, so they should be considered your true “boss.”

The relationship between a designer and player is complex. Twenty years ago, there was almost no communication between players and designers, but now it’s a crucial part of being successful.

Throughout companies big and small, I’ve seen a lot of incredible relationships with players and I’ve seen some wasted opportunities between a design team and player base.

This topic itself is worthy of an article but let’s summarize a few high-level points for now:

• Pay attention to what your players say. Read your official forums, read Reddit, follow Twitter feedback and read reviews of your game, good or bad. Reading the first few negative reviews might make you sad, but you’ll eventually become desensitized to it and be able to process them analytically and use the feedback to benefit future designs.

• Always take feedback personally, don’t listen to advice that says otherwise. You need to take criticism personally so that you are motivated to consider it and act on it if it’s worthwhile. That doesn’t mean that all feedback should be acted on or receive a response.

• Don’t let negative comments get you down – just remember the most passionate players are your best customers and they complain because they care about the game and like it enough to want changes. Remember that you should also take positive comments personally, since you probably worked your butt off to earn that praise. The rewarding part of being a game designer is seeing that the results of your hard work are appreciated by players. Enjoy it.

• You need to internally translate players feedback into a language that makes sense and is helpful. That is an incredibly important skill in a designer or anyone who creates products for other people to use.

• Here’s an example of this player translation skill being put to use: “The loot for this new raid is dogshit” is an example of something you will definitely hear at some point in your career. Translate it into useful design feedback: “Dear designer, I feel like the effort I put into the raid doesn’t pay off with rewards that feel worthwhile to me. I enjoy your game, otherwise I wouldn’t provide feedback, but I really want to feel appropriately rewarded for my time and effort.”  See… so much nicer!

I’m a huge proponent of direct communication between development staff and the player base. It’s not something everyone can do or wants to do, but there is a noticeable difference in player satisfaction and engagement when they interact with a dev team directly on a regular basis This issue has some complexity to it and will be covered in detail in a future article.

In Conclusion

Every studio is different and has slightly different interactions, but new designers should have a good idea of what to expect from everything outlined in this article.

There are many other departments within a company, including finance, HR, recruiting, employee development, legal, executive, operations and IT. Design leadership will frequently work with those departments; I’ll dedicate an article targeted for design management that covers those additional departments

We’ll go into greater detail on some of the relationships in this article as I add more content les to the greatgamedesign.com resource.

I hope you find something in this useful. If you have any questions or would like to see anything added to this article, please let me know here or on Twitter.

Good night and good luck.