What is Game Design?

Game design can be many different things depending on the project you are working on. At an indie studio, a game designer is likely to be the only or one out of two designers, and at Rockstar, you have a gigantic team where each designer is specialized in some specific set of mechanics e.g. driving cars, or storytelling. No matter what you eventually end up doing, you will need a set of tools that are specific for designing experiences and this is what we are going to focus on. Although this course is leaning more towards the digital game experiences, it is also completely possible to use the techniques taught in this course to create physical games e.g. card games or board games. Whatsmore, game design is almost always a type of job that is highly collaborative and requires great communication skills so that you can express your ideas not only verbally but also visually.

In game design, our ultimate goal is to create a specific enough experience for the player that is fun and engaging. I think we understand what engaging means in general, but the more important question is, what is fun? In game design theory, there are generally 8 kinds of fun and they are as follows:

Sensation (Game as sense-pleasure) Fellowship (Game as social framework) Challenge (Game as obstacle course) Fantasy (Game as make-believe) Narrative (Game as drama) Discovery (Game as uncharted territory) Expression (Game as self-discovery) Submission (Game as pastime)

Once you are more experienced, you should try combining multiple types of fun, but for now try focusing primarily on one single type of fun. And no, right now, you cannot appeal to everyone or even two at the same. The reason for that is that, if you are making a game from scratch, you first need to figure out your core mechanics. However if you are working on a project that is past this stage, then perhaps you can focus on designing for a new kind of fun.

Core mechanics are the most important sets of game elements that your game is all about. So for example in Tetris, rotating bricks to fit them in a space, and showing the current score in the corner are both mechanics, but rotating bricks is a core mechanic: without it, there is no Tetris.

I digress. One of the most important tools and frameworks that we will use in creating games or nearly any other digital experience is known as the iterative design process. With it, you will reach success, without it you will be forever lost in a pile of unfinished, gigantic projects. The purpose of this design process is to repeatedly take smaller steps towards success at a time and continuously collect feedback and data about where the design and development work is going. As a designer, we are not only focused on creating, rather we are also focused on learning about what the users want, and “what the game wants to be”! This brings in another topic which is design thinking. We will dive deeper into these in the next chapters, but what design thinking brings to the table is a mindset that we follow to improve our design skills, most notably, the ability to learn at every phase of the work and incorporate the learnings into the design no matter where in the design cycle you are.

In this course, I am going to walk you through the iterative design process and show you how we use various methods to achieve the goals of each phase of this process in game design.