What is Game Design?

Game design is a collection of processes such as programming, creative writing, and graphic design.  Creating a game is a huge and complex process with many tasks and the different roles required to make a finished playable product. It is a subset of the field of game development.

Who is responsible for game designing?

Game designers are responsible persons for game designing.  They take the lead in imagining and bringing to life game stories, characters, gameplay, rules, interfaces, dialogue, and environments. So a game designer is a cross between a writer, artist, and programmer. This role totally differs from the graphic designers and the programmers in the game development team.

Roles on a Development team

There are several roles in the game development team such as Game Designer, Level Designer, Graphic Designer, Programmer, Administrator, DBA, Mathematician, QA, etc. Some major roles are briefly describing below.

• Level design

In this stage the relevant persons have to look at a level at a time, identify the expected characters' ability/resources /available features at that point in the game and design a level to increase their abilities, maintain the look and feel, and not stress out the game player. This person will often also be checked by identifying the clear objectives, opportunities, and obstacles that a level should provide. As well as this person will have scripting knowledge.

• Mathematician

Programmers are usually taking this role on.  Normally programmers will simply create a function name and give a logical explanation of what is support to do. These people are mainly focusing on the logic and the architecture of the game.

• Writer/ Story Designer

This person is usually addressing the plot and character development of the game. That person will design the step by step of the relevant story like what will happen to the next. Responsible for manage the interaction of the companions and the enemies.  Mainly interacting with the level designers to provide ways to move the plot in levels. This role may commonly request methods of interjecting story elements into the game, such as action breaking for conversation and etc.

• Quality Assurance

Mainly this role helps to check testable features in the game. This role is active very early in the process and it helps to ensure that requirements are written in a way that will be testable later.  It is often a good QA to have some knowledge about programming and game development.

How to design a computer game.

There are several stages in the game designing process.

• Designing Game Play

Define your goals.

-In this stage user should clarify some conditions such as what are you trying to do with this game? , what story are you trying to convince and What do you want your players to feel at the end?.

Define your audience.

-It is more important to make a game for a very specific audience.

Design for different platforms.

-At the early stage you need to consider what kind of devices you want your game to be on. Nowadays mobile platforms are quickly becoming a major player but PC and console are still good and strong.

Consider your game type.

-The game type of your game will determine according to the game design.

• Covering the features

Design the tutorial.

-Simply display game instructions and the game rules.

Design the game environment.

-Design the game environment, how expensive that environment, and how challenging it?

Design user levels.

-The levels are the individual parts of the game, That levels should manage accurately.

Design the content and interfaces.

-Need to design all the content like the items that can be interacted with the characters with themselves and etc. As well as have to design the interfaces includes things like the menus and UI.

• Designing Visuals

The look and feel of your game should match the type of game that you’re making. Charming visuals and graphics are an important part of making a game. As well as you can use navigation tricks to easily navigate and play the game.

• Designing the Audio

You have to choose direct sound effects like voices, weapons noises, and item interaction sound effects. You will need to make sure that sound effects make sense within your game. Need to make sure background sound effects are relevant to the environment. As well as the need to use a proper soundtrack to your game.

• Designing your story

The concept of the story should be a solid one and it should be complex enough to make for a rich world, characters, and gameplay. Also need to concern the speed of each game plot and need to avoid storytelling cliches as well.

• Designing your characters

Need to develop fully rich, strong characters in your game. This makes players more engaged and invested in the game. Characters should have diversity like white, straight, male, female and etc.

In addition to these things, you have to collect the game designing skills such as technical knowledge, architectural knowledge, design methodologies and etc. Then you should find a game publisher for your game with a good web site. Also, get your game on appropriate steam.

Challenges when developing a game for multiple platforms.

There are several challenges in developing a multi-platform game.

• Developing a game should support all the input styles such as controller, keyboard, mouse, joystick and etc.
• The game performance differences in the different generations’ devices.
• Each platform must be tested. So there is a lot of QA to cover all the bases.
• Need to support Multi platforms in the industry.