You can’t work with whom you can’t understand. Communication is “THE KEY” of the game industry. As hard as game developing already is, if you can’t be on the same level of understanding as a team, there is a high chance that game will flop as it’s not going to be what it should’ve been.
Whole team needs to understand each other. It’s especially important in small scale studios as they generally do not have the access to the wide array of specialized disciplines. Team members should have the basic understanding of each others pipelines to be as efficient as possible. It’s especially vital for Game Designers as they are generally the person that come up with the idea in first place. They need to explain what’s on their mind as clearly as possible
It is infuriatingly hard to work with a designer who does not know how to use game engines. Rather than keeping a programmer busy with changing decimals of a float, designers should get their hands dirty. (Programmers who don’t/can’t write inspector-friendly code is another can of worms)
Learning how to implement simple mechanics in the engine also helps with visualizing and communicating what your game should look/feel like. Iterating different scenes in the engine also helps with your creative process too as you can stumble upon different ideas while you play. Maybe a bug would become a feature 🙂 While this does not mean a designer should know how to write an AI but it never hurts to learn how to read/write some basic code.
Designers should always look different ways to broaden both their vision and communication skills as it what differs them from the rest. Everyone has an idea, how you interpret it and make it a reality with your team is what makes you a #gamedesigner .