The Concept of Game Design
Game design for mobile games is an essential topic to be discussed nowadays, since the people who are pros in this field are scarce especially in the middle east, there are more than 4 billion apps and games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store as of 2021, and not so many that can be called a well-established games with a good game design Document.
So what is Game Design?
Game design is the process was to decide how the game should be within the possible capabilities and resources on the different aspects including story, rules, look and feel, timing, pacing, risk-taking, rewards, punishments, and everything else the player experiences all that by coming up with ideas and writing them down about these topics and connecting them all together in a reasonable form that can deliver the main purpose of game entertainment, telling story or education.
And to know more about game design and game designers we need to know and understand the component that will design the game itself, concisely its set of goals blocked with obstacles and challenges followed by actions and activities (which is called playing) to undertake these challenges while these actions are ruled by some constraints. In other words, we can say that game design is the engine of any gaming company that makes every work connected with each other to make a well-designed game.
So let’s clarify the main responsibilities of game designers
- Design and develop the original concept (the idea of the game, what value can it add to the user).
- Construct level structure
Analyzing and studying different games to learn more about the systems and how they work according to the game’s genre. - Write storyline, character bios, dialogue, plot points, game objective.
- Storyboard the action of the game.
- Conceive every element of the game including rules, setting, objects, vehicles, weapons, flora, fauna, etc…
- Generate the Game Design Document (GDD).
It is the most important step in developing a game design, it’s where everything in mind and ideas can be reflected into written documents, all the chaos in a game designer’s brain can be seen and organized. - Develop early prototypes
Hereafter generating the GDD, the first prototype or sample of the game can be seen by developers and testers, it’s the process where it sees all the flaws of a game, and making mechanisms and fixes to make it error-free. - Decide on the devices and platforms on which the game is played
Not all games work on all devices, some games work only on high-tier devices depending on the quality and size of the game. - Define the user experience
Here we can determine the user’s behavior and interest in a game, how they are going through the flow of the game, is it hard? Does the leveling system need optimization? So basically, it’s how the users see the game. - Create storyboards and write scripts
The final step of making a game design, it’s where the puzzle is completed and ready to be published for all users, everything is connected.
Game Designers Skills
Game designers love playing games and not only for personal entertainment, they tend to study and analyze all the systems while they are playing, they want to know how things actually work and are able to break them down into processes and actions. but luckily you have playtesters to help you as well. In addition, there are several other core skills for game designers:
- Communication: You need to be able to communicate your creative vision clearly. You need to sell your game. This also means you will need to learn to write and present properly to captivate other people with your ideas. But as Jesse Schell also notes in his Art of Game Design book, you need to be a great listener to be a great game designer. Listening to the team and being able to synthesize their ideas and your creative vision is what makes the game a truly collaborative product in the end.
- Teamwork: a game designer has to work and interact closely with many people in the development team, art department, programmers, and producers to help them understand one another. Game design is a team effort and game designers ensure that everyone is able to contribute to the game.
- Process: Games are systems with lots of interdependent elements. Changing one element (e.g., the balance of your game) might introduce many problems to another element. Understanding how this linked system works and being able to advocate a process of creating the game in all team members is a core game design skill. Making sure to develop your game in small iterations and playtesting elements accordingly helps guide your development process. Being on top of this process is your job.
- Inspiration: Putting on different lenses to view the real world and its underlying system and relationships is another elementary skill. Investing money, romantic courtship, even life itself can be considered as systems that are similar to games. Trying to find the rules and challenges helps you understand these systems. Being able to deconstruct what inspires you will make you a better game designer.
- Becoming a better player: A better player does not refer to getting more skilled at playing (e.g., becoming a Dota 2 or LoL pro player). No, it means to be able to observe yourself during play and understand your experiences. Understanding common patterns and elements in games will make you more game literate. If you understand how the game systems work in the games you are playing (i.e., how they create meaning), then you are on your way to creating better games of your own.
- Creativity: Being able to find inspiration from other parts of your life is crucial for designing games. Many great game designers are inspired by all sorts of complex real-life systems and are able to channel this creativity. A good exercise for this is thinking back about your childhood and the games that you have played as a kid. Do you remember what was so engaging about them?
After completing the full plan of a game and its balance, game designers have to follow up the development pipeline because our imagination can be a perfect place for our ideas but the real world could not be the same when it comes to implementing the ideas into real action, sometimes it might not be as we expect. Some game mechanics can be impossible to make at some point so the game designer has to test and analyze the result to make a distinction between the game developers ( Engineers, animators, modelers, musicians, writers, producers, and designers) and game designer.