Game Designing
What is Game Designing ?
Game designing is the art and science of creating the rules, structure, narrative, and user experience of a game. It defines how the game plays, what players experience, and what makes it engaging or challenging. Game designing is about crafting experiences. It combines art, storytelling, logic, and psychology.
Key areas of Game Designing
- Game Concept & Genre: It includes the core idea and theme of the game. Genre of the game like a battle royale, racing game, or a RPG (role playing game)
- Story & Narrative: A story includes plot, character backstories, world-building, and dialogue
- Gameplay Mechanics: Gameplay mechanics like the movement of player (run, jump, climb) ; Interactions like shoot, talk, trade ; combat systems, puzzles, scoring, power-ups, and physics.
- Level Design: Designing the environments the player moves through. Includes placement of obstacles, enemies, puzzles, items, and checkpoints.
- Character & Enemy Design: H0w do character look, behave, and grow? What special abilities or powers do they have?
- User Interface (UI) & User Experience (UX) :
- UI = buttons, menus, HUD (health bar, ammo, etc.)
- UX = how easy and enjoyable it is for players to interact with the game.
- Build early versions of the game to test ideas.
- Playtesting reveals what’s fun or frustrating.
How to Become a Game Designer?
” A Game designer is like a director and architect of a game “
- Education: A degree in game design, computer science, interactive media, or a related field is the most obvious path that should give you a good foundation. However, formal education is not the only path: Many successful game designers have learned through self-study and practice.
- Develop skills: Focus on developing various skills essential to game design. These include: Game design principles: Study the fundamentals of game design, game mechanics, player motivation, level design, and user experience (UX) design. Programming and scripting: Learn the basics of programming languages commonly used in game development (C++, C#, or Python). Knowledge of scripting languages like Lua or JavaScript can also be valuable. Art and design: Gain knowledge in 2D and 3D art, animation, graphic design, and visual storytelling. You can also benefit from knowing design software such as Photoshop or Maya. Communication and collaboration: Game design often involves working in teams. Strengthen your communication, teamwork, and collaboration skills.
- Build a portfolio: Include examples of game prototypes, level designs, documentation, or other relevant work.
- Gain experience: This can involve working on personal projects, participating in game jams, contributing to open-source projects, or interning at game studios. Building a network within the gaming industry can also provide you with connections and opportunities.
- Stay updated: Research new game releases, attend conferences or events, join online communities, and follow game design blogs and podcasts.
- Specialize. As you gain experience, consider specializing in a specific area of game design that aligns with your interests and strengths. This could be character design, narrative design, level design, game mechanics, or user experience (UX) design.
Tools Used in Game Designing
- Game Engines: Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot
- Design Docs: Game Design Document (GDD)
- Art Tools: Photoshop, Blender, Illustrator
- Prototyping: Construct, RPG maker, paper sketches
Careers in Game Design
- Game Designer
- Level Designer
- Narrative Designer
- UI/UX Designer
- Systems Designer
