Game design is a nebulous job. People have asked me how they can become a game designer. They have some great ideas. Maybe they’ll take some classes.
So I’ve created a syllabus for my upcoming free class called “So You Wanna Be a Game Designer”:

The purpose of this is as follows:

Think of this as night school. Before you spend your hard earned money and time learning C++, Maya, and Java… This course will help you to get the experience of design, without all of the overhead.

I need a good response when people ask me how they can be a game designer. Part of me wants to tell them to take out a huge loan, pack up and go to Full Sail for a couple of years.

It seems like there should be a quicker method for finding out if the discipline is attractive.

If this thing is works it can be a do-it yourselfer, with a final project you can share with your friends.

So I want to create a 2 month crash course to find out if you’ve got the chops. Luckily, I already have a test subject.

So anyways. Here’s my current syllabus for weeks 1 - 3.

1) Design a new “real materials” game. Examples include charades, boccie ball, and tag. The deliverable is a 1 or 2 page document that explains the game’s rules and play structure. If people can read it and easily understand what they need, and how to play the game, then your first homework is a sucess.

2) Focus test your game. Iterate upon your game. Clarify any rules questions that have been found. Game design is very much about iteration and creation. Finally type up the notes you’ve gotten from your focus testers. What worked? What failed?
The first two weeks deal with design in a way that someone with any skill set can attempt. As my friend Justin pointed out to me: “It’s worthless to spend years learning how to program, and then discover you actually don’t like designing games.”

By this point I estimate a good percentage of budding game designers have moved to greener pastures and have dropped out. Actual design and iteration is not as fun for some as they would like to believe. The remaining students are energized by focusing their creative energies.

3) This is tricky.

I feel that a game designer should know something about scripting. This may merit some harsh criticism from some who would say “no designer scripting“. As someone who primarily is payed to script my butt off, I can’t help but to say that, in my experience, it’s a darn fine skill to have as a designer. In “Rusty’s School of Game Design” we’re going to dive in despite all of the controversy and get started on scripting instead of tackling level design or something similar.
There is also a lot of debate here as to the best engine to get our budding designers started.

Neverwinter Nights has a particularly good engine for building missions and dialog. I’m throwing this one out for the simple reason that it’s a bit too focused of an engine for my program.

Flash is a bit sexier for me right now because of the flexibility and sharability of the game. This is still in the running but it gets minus points for the higher pricepoint pushing $700 for CS3 Professional. Also it is restrictive in regard to 3-D graphics.

Game Maker is a gem at $20 and that’s for the professional version. The good news is it has a lot of tutorials, is cheap, and is specifically set up for making games. It even makes .exe’s! The bad news is that its 3D capabilities are limited.

Shoot’em Ups like Team Fortress 2 have good SDKs and tools for creating custom levels. This is appealing, but once again I am determined to focus more on scripting than level design at first, as this course is designed primarily to help people understand whether they they like the day-to-day activities of a designer and I feel that people may enjoy modding and level design more than scripting.
So, the current top-dog for getting everyone’s feet wet in scripting is Yoyo Games’ Game Maker.

I’d like to hear from potential “students” as well as experienced industry people before we nail down week 3 and move on to making weeks 3 - 6.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Gaming, Philosophy and Religion, Social and Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.