Game Design Process

Game Design skills

Game design is very broad, the specific skills that I particularly enjoy are listed here.

- Rapid prototyping and ideation

- Scope management & on the fly project reevaluation.

- Polishing, oil and juice (yes, they're all different)

- Writing and maintaining documentation

Game Design "Pipeline"

Game design and development is an incredibly diverse and difficult discipline where you have to take in consideration an incredible amount of different things (pacing, balancing, player feedback, goals, challenge, progress, juicing, story, world etc) and there is no simple "right" way to do it. The following is a rough guideline for an isolated mechanic, and does not take the entire process into account.

Ideation

I start off doing general research, and use a variety of methods like wordclouds and sketching to get a variety of ideas, even if they are just fodder. I especially like trying to get inspiration from random sources like playlists or species of plants etc. Using whatever the design pillars are or the target experience is I will eventually narrow down this list and get the best fitting mechanics.

Prototyping

Thinking something's a good idea is usually wrong, this is why we test things out! I'll try to make quick prototypes making heavy use of recording gifs and my own thoughts to document the process. As well as using github and other source control systems to easily switch in between different variations of the different system implementations I can test.

Assessment

Playtesting and testing your prototypes is done throughout making prototypes automatically, but it's important to do testing with other people as well. Showing colleagues and friends is important to gather feedback or insight that you alone wouldn't have thought of! And especially the first couple of times that you iterate on something it's very important to make sure future iterations are started on the right track.

Habits & Improvements

To improve my ability I keep a journal on all my creative projects, both in the workspace and the ones in my free time. One of the main issues I run in to during designing is mostly my own tunnel vision, usually when I'm just focusing on one implementation detail. As soon as I notice it it is easy to get out of but noticing is usually the problem. Though as long as I have colleagues or people to talk to about it it is usually resolved quite quickly. So working in tandem with other people tends to bring out the best in my abilities. It's extremely important to consider many aspects of your project and sometimes no implementation is better than a good implementation, so constant re-evaluation is incredibly needed in design.

All these steps you can repeat as much as you want but usually only as much as you have time for. The project linked on the left here is an old but valid example.

Feel free to click the link below to see the game itself.

Get in touch at robbeheyde1@gmail.com to see my resume

Google Sites

Report abuse