Rather than placing games in the service of another field such as sociology, literary criticism, or computer science, our aim is to study games within their own disciplinary space. Thus game design, as a discipline, requires a focus on games in and of themselves. The focus of a game designer is designing game play, conceiving and designing rules and structures that result in an experience for players. A game designer might create card games, social games, video games or any other kind of game. A game designer might work alone or as part of a larger team. A game designer is not necessarily a programmer, visual designer or project manager, although sometimes he or she can also play these roles in the creation of a game. In Rules of Play (2004), Katie Salen and Eric Zimmermann write:Ī game designer is a particular kind of designer, much like a graphic designer, industrial designer or architect. Finally, a game may be art-driven, such as Myst (1993) and Journey (2012), mainly to show off impressive visuals designed by artists. Alternatively, a game may be technology-driven, such as Quake (1996), to show off a particular hardware achievement or to market the game engine. However, if financial issues do not influence designer's decisions, the game becomes design- or designer-driven few games are designed this way because of lack of funding. įunding game publishers must be taken into account, who may have specific expectations from a game as most video games are market-driven - developed to sell for profit. It is common for the game designer's name to misleadingly be given an undue amount of association to the game, neglecting the rest of the development team. Ī game designer often plays video games and demos to follow the game market development. The designer may use scripting languages to implement and preview design ideas without necessarily modifying the game's codebase. Design changes have a significant positive or negative impact on required resources. For example, consistency with the game's vision, budget or hardware limitations. Many decisions are made during the course of a game's development about the game's design it is the responsibility of the designer to decide which elements will be implemented. The game designer usually produces an initial game proposal document containing the concept, gameplay, feature list, setting and story, target audience, requirements and schedule, staff and budget estimates. Designers often experiment with mixing genres. The game idea will fall within one or several genres. Video game design starts with an idea, often a modification on an existing concept. Many early veterans chose the game design path eschewing programming and delegating those tasks to others. Soon game complexity demanded team members focused on game design. As video games became more complex, computers and consoles became more powerful, the job of the game designer became separate from the lead programmer. A notable exception to this policy was Coleco, which from its very start separated the function of design and programming. This is the case of such noted designers as Sid Meier, John Romero, Chris Sawyer and Will Wright. Historically, video game programmers have sometimes comprised the entire design team. Video game design requires artistic and technical competence as well as sometimes including writing skills. In larger companies like Electronic Arts, each aspect of the game (control, level design) may have a separate producer, lead designer and several general designers. As the industry has aged and embraced alternative production methodologies such as agile, the role of a principal game designer has begun to separate - some studios emphasizing the auteur model while others emphasizing a more team oriented model. In these cases, there are generally one or two principal designers and many junior designers who specify subsets or subsystems of the game. However, with very complex games, such as MMORPGs or a big budget action or sports title, designers may number in the dozens. The video game designer is very much like the director of a film the designer is the visionary of the game and controls the artistic and technical elements of the game in fulfillment of their vision. Within the video game industry, video game design is usually just referred to as " game design", which is a more general term elsewhere. Some common video game design subdisciplines are world design, level design, system design, content design, and user interface design. Video game design is the process of designing the content and rules of video games in the pre-production stage and designing the gameplay, environment, storyline and characters in the production stage.
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