The Art and Science of Game Design: A Comprehensive Guide
Game design involves creativity, technical skills, and a deep understanding of human psychology. Whether your game designer or beginner looking to develop your skills, this guide will explore the important elements of game design.
Understanding the Basics
1. What is game design?
Game design is the process of creating the blue print of the game. It involves the gameplay mechanics ,storyline, characters, environment, and how the player will interact with the world. The goal of the game design is to provide a smooth experience for the players. In simple words, game design is about brainstorming the idea and making the document (aka game design document).2. Key element of Game design
Game design document: It contains the ideas about the game. It also contain various information about the game and on the basis of the document the game is made.Gameplay mechanics: It is the building block of the game that define how the game should operate .It is used to determine how the player will interact with the world.
Character Design: It involves making the character that players can interact with or control. Character design plays a important role in game development.
World design: It involves making a beautiful world so that player can immerse themselves into the world.
Process
1. Design Document:
This is part where you write down the ideas for the game. Which include core idea of the game, target audience, unique selling points. Gather ideas from the other games, films.2. Make Prototype:
Create a basic version of your game to test its mechanics. The game prototype can be made using the Unity, unreal engine. Test the prototype before moving to next phase.3. Development:
Build game based on the prototype. This involves art creation, sound design, programming.4. Testing :
In this stage another person will test your game. By doing this we get to know whether there is bug or glitch in the game.5. Launch:
Release your game in the market with the help of apps like playstore, steam, epic.6. Post Launch support:
In this stage you take the feedback from the players and try to improve your game further. This is most important stage which must be followed by everyone who’s making game.
Key points of game design
1. Balance:
The game should be balance in terms of difficulty and reward. This is one of the most important key to ensue that players can get the smooth experience while playing game.
2. Portability:
The game should be available on various platform. The game should work well in low end device so everybody and enjoy game.
3. Iteration:
Game developer should always gather feedback from the player and work on them. By doing this they can develop their trust between community.
Tools for making games
1. Game engines:
Unity: It is most popular among the mobile game developer.
Unreal: It is most popular engine among the AAA title maker like fortnite.
2. Sound tools:
Audacity: A free, open-source audio editor.
FMOD: A sound effects engine used in many professional games.
Reaper: A digital audio workstation for recording and editing audio.
Conclusion
This are the various phase through which every game goes through. Each phase hold and important role in the development of the game. The future of the game design is very bright due to more new technology.
