Mobile Games Salary and Insights for 2025

What is a Video Game Developer?

Often, game developers work on multiple parts of a game, such as visuals, AI, user interface, and game logic. A game developer acts as a coder who takes the designs, storyboards, and direction of level goals by game designers and makes the game work as something for gamers to play.

Tasks and Responsibilities

The tasks that define your role as a game developer will vary depending on the organization you work for and your specific specialization. At larger game companies, you can expect to have a more compartmentalized role working on one aspect of a game. At an indie publisher, you might oversee multiple stages in the lifecycle of a game. These are some of the day-to-day tasks you might perform in this role:

• Develop new ideas for game design
• Translate visual ideas into code
• Prototype, iterate, and polish gameplay
• Collaborate with designers, producers, artists, and quality analysts
• Monitor game stability across platforms
• Review existing code and recommend improvements
• Port games or elements from one system to another

Specializations

Further, in addition to deciding what kind of developer you might want to become, you might also elect to specialize. You can become skilled in a niche, for example, based on system (console, computer, mobile), game type (simulation, adventure, role-playing, strategy, etc), or a particular game element (in-game systems, levels, UI, environment, etc).

Game Developer Skills

Being able to list the right technical skills on your résumé can lead to opportunities for you as a game developer. Such skills include experience with game development engines or coding (often in C# or C++).

• Unity: A cross-platform engine to create games in 2D and 3D, widely used for indie and mobile games. Unity is free for students and 100% free for personal use, so you can start making games (and learning by doing) even before you get hired.
• Unreal Engine: Originally designed for first-person shooters, it’s now a general 3D editor for generating games on a variety of platforms. Its programming language is C++.
• C# (C sharp): One of the most common programming languages used for game development and mobile applications (with Unity).
• C++: A general-purpose programming language commonly used to create not only games but also operating systems and applications.