What do "Character Designers" do in the game industry?

Question

I'm curious about character designers, do they design characters in game related images like wallpapers or something like these :

Answer 1

The task of "character design" is to take a character idea from a game designer and then come up with how that character could look. Which requires to visualize that look in some artistic medium. They usually go through several iterations. They create a rough sketch, ask the team for feedback regarding what does and does not work about the character, and then create more sketches until the team figured out the final look of their cast of characters.

One could consider "character designer" as a subset of "concept artists": People who come up with how things could look and then create images for internal use. The artworks they produce are usually not supposed to be seen by the public (although a particularly good piece of concept art might occasionally find its way onto a loading screen or advertisement banner). They primarily serve as reference for those artists who create the actual game assets or promotional material: 2d artists and 3d artists.

But in practice there is usually a lot of overlap between character design and other disciplines of game art. Especially in smaller teams, where people tend to wear many hats at once. In a smaller team, it might be just one person who comes up with the character and then skips the concept stage and creates the game-ready assets for that character right away. Or if there is a dedicated concept artist, then they might create concept art for all kinds of things in the game, not just characters.