Game Director

What does a Game Director do?

A game director is the force behind the creative aspects of a video game. You’re similar to a film director because your vision shapes and defines the game. Together with a team of game designers, you create a road map for the game at large. Once the vision is laid out, you work with a development team to fill in all the technical, aesthetic, and narrative details.

As a game director, your duties technically fall between those of a game producer who monitors the budget, schedule, and progress of a game, and a game designer who heads the game design team. Depending on the size of your game studio, your actual job tasks might veer widely into these other positions. And on smaller productions, the position of director might actually be that of designer/director/producer, so you should be familiar with all areas.

Regardless, your duties always include managing the design team, acting as the creative authority, and creating the grand-scale design trajectories. Your studio might ask you to meet with video game publishers, run team meetings, and hire game developers for the project. On the whole, your job is to make sure that all aspects of the game development—from what the characters look like to how hard a level is—fit with your vision of the end product.