Top Skill Every Game Designer Need To Succeed

 

What Skill Do A Game Designer  Need To Succeed?

Video game industry veteran and CG spectrum department  head of game design, Troy Dunniway head of game design  generally answers this very much asked question by exploring some of the technical artistic and soft skills needed to become a successful game designer in the video game industry.

What Skill Does A Game Designer Need?

Having artistic skill and technical aptitude may tremendously aid one to succeed as a designer.

If one has a previous skill in art and engineering it is great  if one just continues to expand the knowledge and skill in these areas .

But one should try to learn the core skill of a game designer and then figure out how to apply the existing skill to the design role as a part of game development.

As A Game Designer One Need –

Understand what makes a game fun and how to create a great user experience.

Understand how to break down things in systems.

One should have great soft skills and the ability to communicate effectively and work within a team.

Know how to understand and use data to qualitative information to thus affect your design.

Have basic to advanced drawing skills to communicate ideas visually.

A  basic understanding of 3d art modelling texturing rigging animation and other areas of 3d art creation use and conversion.

One must have a good understanding of technical implementation with games scripting languages syntax and other basic programming concepts.

Possess a great understanding of game level level layout drawing maps architecture and other design areas and related to game level design.

Have basic to advanced knowledge of interface design and UI/UX in game.

Have basic to advanced storytelling and writing skills for writing games, stories and quests.

One should know how to operate basic programmes for writing documents, spreadsheets, presentation flowcharting, image editing and creation.

A good game designing course should cover  artistic skill focusing on fun, technical skill cross lateral knowledge , problem solving adaptivity skill , game design proficiency.

Artistic Skill In Game Design –

As a game designer  it is very much necessary  to create art, but it is not required.

Relevant skills should cover a wide variety of things from art direction illustration and sketching UI/UX  creation, 3d modelling animation and a number of other areas.

On some team the level of artist will very much create a bunch of assets which a designer may plop into as they are creating it.

However while this used to be easy the density of assets from much quick devices has increased exponentially in the last few years which allows levels to to have various things in them.

For example in 1990 a level took up 64 kb. Now it is around 100 GB.

Many games are always pushing the visual boundaries of what the latest PC and games may draw on screen and levels today may look much more realistic and may have a lot of minute detail in them.

Whereas before a level designer might just need a place down a single building in a location now the same building may be surrounded by props foliage and hundreds or thousands of small objects to make it feel more integrated and realistic.

Placing game assets now takes an artistic eye and this has disrupted many team pipelines.

Now after a designer finishes placing assets a level artist may need to come in and polish the level visually.

This doesn’t need someone  as a designer to know how to model, texture, animate  or create art from scratch but this might  require some sense of how to assemble  and place assets in a way that makes them feel either more realistic or visually pleasing.

Lighting composition effects and atmosphere are very much critical to good level design and are very much connected to art skill and areas to learn about as a level design which is a speciality of game designers.

If one is thinking of becoming a game designer a level designer should consider learning and practising the skill one would need on how to assemble levels that are great looking as well as fun.

As a game designer at least one should be familiar with some 2d art tools like Adobe Photoshop and illustrator in order to create basic mockup UI/UX mockups and flow level drawings flowchart and other simple illustrations to just communicate visually.

Focussing On Fun In Game Design –

While developing Co spectrum game design courses one should make the conscious decision to try to focus learning on fundamental foundation concepts related to how to prepare game fun.

As a game designer one should first and foremost need to be a master of how to make a game level fun, interesting, compelling and something a player would want to play.

Technical Skill In Game Design –

It is almost impossible to be a game designer without some level of technical knowledge and skill.

One need not become a game programmer to be a successful game designer but one needs to verify the concepts.

Just knowing them may be beneficial to a game designer but it is not required.

As a game designer one needs mostly to work with scripting things and using a lot of math.

Common game scripting language as a Python Lua & C# but many others exist.

A scripting language is a simplified language is a simplified programming language.

They are usually much easier to learn and often are visually represented.

This means one is working with boxes and lines to connect with them where each represents the same kind of technical ability or function.

This might be much easier than trying to learn how to write out a language in words and having to worry about very complex syntax.

Cross Lateral Knowledge As A Game Designer –

Being a game designer is very much difficult.

In order to become a game designer one needs to know a lot .

Game design itself is a tool engine to use and often the subject matter related to the game .

If one is doing a game based on modern military or historical subjects one might have to do a lot of reading, movie watching and research to understand what to use in a game.

Problem Solving Skill In Game Design –

Making games is very hard at many levels but if one couldn’t solve complex problems in design technology the game engine or various other areas one will be in constant struggle and frustration.

Adaptivity Skill In Game –

Another form of problem solving is to design around the problem.

Many game designers think that to make fun of something or a different one they need something new or unique.

However, knowing how to use or reuse, adapt things in new and innovative ways and make the most out of what one might have is critical to have success as a designer.

One might create creative things by combining character mechanics with level features like even subtle changes to show how fast an enemy is.

Game Engine Proficiency –

One needs to know how to use unreal engine and provide its own unreal framework to just input it in real game.

Some tutorial documents and videos  available in youtube may help an aspiring game designer how to increase game designing proficiency.

These are certain top skills every game designer needs  to know.

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