How to Become a Game Designer
The simplest answer to ‘How do I become a game designer?’ is…
Make a game.
That’s pretty much it. The game you make doesn’t have to have a large scope or be complex. It can be two minutes of gameplay, or something with the simplest game loop, like earning points for completing an action. It doesn’t even have to be digital.
I’ve made over 50 games across maybe 30 teams. Some games never got finished, some sucked, some were played by thousands, some have been card games, some have been digital, a lot were made in game jams. I learned a ton about collaboration and scope as part of all of this.
As a professional designer it’s important to be able to curate ideas, design systems, take a methodical approach to solving problems, and collaborate with stakeholders. I’ve written about this in The Top 5 Skills Every Game Designer Needs.
I’m sure you want to know something a little more practical, so let’s look at a few ways to get started making a game.
Join a Game Jam
At one point in my life I was an intern designer at a small games studio funded by my university. Someone invited me to a game jam. I was afraid to say yes; I wasn’t an experienced designer, I didn’t have a lot of experience in Unity, and I had never made an entire experience. But I said yes.
I worked with a few other people in my undergrad program and we came up with a game that was going to be awesome! It had a large scope and we had so many ideas we wanted to implement. We were going to finish it!
We didn’t finish it. It barely worked. It had no game loop.
But I knew so much more about making games just from that three days of working on something on a team of four.
I attended a local game jam for my first one, but there are global recurring jams like Global Game Jam, Ludum Dare (pronounced DA-ray), and a ton organized by the community on itch.io.
Design a Game on Paper
You’ll learn a lot from designing a level on paper. If you write out the steps you want the player to take and the structure of the level, you’ll soon start to see where it breaks down and how you can iterate on it. Once you’re able to block it out and prototype it, testing it (even on your own) will reveal a lot of gaps and improvements as well.
Design a System in a Spreadsheet
Game design often involves large amounts of data, and understanding how that data interfaces with all the systems in the game.
A good exercise is come up with a system, like an inventory or quest system, design various types of content for it, and list out all the data associated with it.
For instance, if your inventory system holds hairbrushes, and you design five hairbrushes, the data may look something like this:
- Type
- Mechanic
- Description
- Color
- Hair shine factor
- Cost
Then you need to figure out how to use those hairbrushes within a larger system to add value to them.
Build a World
Some designers focus on the theme and narrative of a world. This impacts a lot of the design of a game, even when it may not be shown to the player. A great way to start designing a game is to start imagining the environment, the characters, what drives those characters, the technology in the world, and how all of these play parts in the story.
I’ve created this framework to help people start writing a narrative for their games. Once you have this, it’s easier to translate your ideas into visuals in a game.
Analyze Games
One of the best ways to get started making games is to analyze what you like and dislike about games you play, and breaking down why the creators made certain design decisions in their games.
For instance, you may want to focus on breaking down a system, or a first time user experience, or even just collect all the store items in other games within the genre to understand the trends in games.
I’ve written a couple of articles to use as examples, where I broke down Viva Piñata and Neko Atsume.
Being a game designer means collaborating with many different roles and championing other people’s ideas. Having ideas is 5% of the work. Here’s what you’ll be doing:
- Clearly communicating design vision and priorities to the rest of the team
- Working with stakeholders
- Doing market research and designing for a specific audience
- Understanding principles of UX and psychology of play
- Taking a methodical approach to problem solving, and knowing what tools to use when to prototype to answer unknowns
- Organizing playtests and synthesizing feedback, and feeding that back into your game design process
Once you create a game or two and start understanding the role and responsibility of a game designer, you’ll be able to figure out what you want to focus on, and you can start building skills in one or more game design areas (level design, narrative design, interaction design, etc). Check out my article on How to Design a Game to help get you started in the process of making a game.
Have fun!
