Game design is a skill like any other. People tend to improve at skills through two primary approaches: practice and study. Thus, in my opinion the most useful exercises are the ones that allow you to practice game design, study it, or both.

If you want to practice game design, build game design prototypes and try stuff out. At the basic level, you can try coming up with house rules for a game you already know, like seeing how different chess would play if each team had four knights and no bishops, or removing scissors from Rock-Paper-Scissors. What about these variations works and what doesn’t? If you feel ambitious, step it up by [downloading a game toolset] and making your own mods or game content. Build a quest in Skyrim or a new map in Starcraft 2 or Portal. Come up with a new format for Magic: The Gathering. Then, once you’ve gotten it playable, ask friends/family/acquaintances to try it out for you and gather their feedback. What could you do better? What worked and didn’t work? Why?

If you want to study games, I suggest playing a lot of different games and analyzing them - especially games that aren’t the kind of game you normally like to play. There are a lot of available and fairly niche game experiences out there - games for children, freemium mobile games, MMOGs, sports titles, simulation titles, strategy titles, and so on. At the very least, you can grab every weekly free game on the Epic Game Store and play them. As you play through each game, keep the analytical part of your brain on. What parts of the game work and what don’t? Why do you think they made this particular choice instead of that one? Who do you think this feature or content is this for? 

This isn’t playing the games for fun, or at least not for the usual reason people play games. This is studying and you should treat it as such. Take notes down as you play and review each game later. See if you can find discernible patterns in the various games you’ve studied. Think about those patterns and what purpose they serve. Are the reasons the same? Remember, every feature and piece of content in a game was put there deliberately. There is a reason for it. The better you are at figuring out why they did certain things, the better you will be at figuring out when and where you would want to do something similar.

For best results, I suggest a mixture of both approaches. Let your observations from the games you’ve played direct the kind of prototypes and design experiments you try. If your experiments make you think of gameplay from a different kind of game, track down some good and bad games in that space and try them out. See what makes them good or bad. See if there are any interesting things to learn from them, especially the bad games. It is very rare to find a game with no redeeming qualities whatsoever - I’ve learned as much from playing bad games as I have from good ones. The goal is to increase your overall understanding of what tools might be available, how much it costs (time, effort, learning, etc.) to use those tools, and when those tools might be appropriate. Then, when you want to craft a particular experience within a game, you understand which tools to use.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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Hello! I would be happy to answer your questions.

What type of education or training is required to become a video game designer?

While some universities now offer game design as a major, there is no hard and fast education or training requirement for being a game designer. The core requirement for being a game designer is the ability to think about what kind of game content and features would be interesting to the game's target audience. This means that studies in a lot of creative fields can help with a game designer's skills - creative writing, film and stage production, filmmaking and cinematography, interior design, and similar fields are all very useful. That said, other fields are also good for breadth of knowledge as well - history, philosophy, technology, art, etc. provide a lot of additional context for creating believable and interesting game content.

Are there any expectations in the industry that are different than reality?

Absolutely. Regular people seem to think that being a game designer means that I play games all day long. Gamers seem to think that I just do whatever I want. In reality, we have pretty clear-cut goals. We need to do what we think is best for the game overall, and that means we always make decisions with the game’s future in mind, even if it means disappointing some of the players in the present. That means nerfing things players don’t want to be nerfed. That means choosing which bugs to fix because some are higher priority than others. That means not doing things we wish we could because of legal reasons that we are not allowed to talk about. That means creating content for microtransactions to earn money so that we can pay our developers to continue to develop new game content.

Qualities that would make someone more successful in the industry?

The most valuable quality I can think of is the ability to see from someone else’s perspective. A lot of designer hopefuls I’ve talked to have wanted to work on one game in specific that they love and ignore the broad variety of games out there. I’ve worked in games for a long time and I have worked on a lot of different kinds of games, some of which were not the kind of games I like to play. In order to do good work as a game designer, I still need to be able to create fun and interesting game content for the players of the game - even if I am not a fan of that kind of game. The ability to understand what the players of a particular game find fun and why is incredibly valuable.

Any recommendations to help me prepare for this career in the future?

If you want to do game design as a career, you should try making games yourself in your spare time. Run a tabletop RPG campaign. Participate in a game jam. Create your own cards for a card game. Create your own rules for a card game. Create your own rules for a chess or checkers game. Make mods for a game with mod tools like Skyrim or Roblox. Make your own levels in Mario Maker. Whenever you do this, ask yourself whether the rules make the game more fun. Consider how the new rules change the game and how they make the player feel. 

I hope these answers help. Cheers!

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I wanted to design games since I was a child. I used to hand-draw level designs and character designs, outline stories, and come up with gameplay ideas for games back when I was in elementary school. They weren't particularly amazing ideas, but I started when I was five years old. In high school, I excelled in math and science. It made sense for me to pursue engineering and computer science when I went to university, both to appease my strict and demanding parents and to further my personal goal of getting into game dev.

While I was at university, I took a software engineering course that bid teams of engineering students do a self-directed project over the entire class length. I wanted to make a video game and persuaded my other teammates to join me. We ended up making a mod (with a new map and our own game rules) for a popular first person shooter at the time. I spent a huge number of hours working on that game. I roped several of my friends into playtesting my game for me, and I knew I had found my calling when one of them complained about missing dinner because he had been so engrossed playing my game. After that class ended, I started making mods for other games on my own time for fun. I continued to do so through graduation.

After I graduated from school, I went to the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco and handed out my resume to all of the recruiting companies that would take it. I got one callback from a studio looking to hire a junior UI programmer, somehow managed to persuade them that I was teachable and motivated (mostly because I had been making mods on my own), and got a job offer. I’ve been working in games in some form or other ever since.

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Some designers certainly do! If I were teaching a course on level design, I would absolutely take my students on field trips to Disneyland to study it. Not every designer studies real world attractions or locations, but that’s more because game design as an academic field lacks commonly-held standards. I do think that good level designers would see the benefit of studying spaces and environments in general, be they real or virtual.

A lot of game design is either self-taught or learned on the job. The lack of academic study of game design generally means that we tend to (re)discover the same game design principles regularly - there’s no central repository of game design knowledge or published game design papers, so it is fully possible that both Neelo and Desmal figure out very similar solutions to a design problem completely separately. Another affectation of this is that we often see the same end results in game design, but with wildly different paths to reach that end result. Since we don’t have a common academic curriculum for game design, much of the learning process is left to each particular teacher.

When it comes to level design in particular, there’s actually a lot to be learned from the established academic field of Interior Design. We might be placing chasms and monsters in addition to tables, chairs, and lights, but there are an awful lot of conceptual crossovers between level design and interior design. Level design is, at its core, about creating environments that players are able to navigate intuitively without getting lost (unless that’s intentional). If anybody is interested in level design, I cannot stress how useful basic interior design principles are to learning how to build engaging environments.

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Sure thing. Here are my answers.

1. What do you do as a game dev?

I am responsible for creating the rules for the game I am working on. These sort of rules are often things like:

Establishing such rules allows us to build the game taking these rules into account. If we know how far Mario can jump, we can make gaps that are easy, hard, and even impossible for Mario to jump. We can create levels that have different paths for players to discover by jumping properly. We can place power-ups in easy, hard, or impossible to reach places. Having rules allows us to create fun ways to play within those rules.

2. How did you discover this job and what made you want to do it?

When I was a child, I played video games for the first time and thought they were wonderful things. I had so many ideas for games the games I played that I thought were super cool, and even ideas for games that didn’t exist yet. Then I found out that there were people whose job it was to make these games and I thought “Wow, that’s what I want to do!” so I went to school, studied hard, and eventually got to do it.

3.  How much do you get paid as a game dev?

It depends on what kind of game dev you are. Most game devs are either programmers, designers, producers, artists, or testers. Programmers usually start off being paid more, testers usually start off being paid less, and the other fields are usually somewhere in between. As you get more experience and level up as a game dev, you usually get promoted and paid more. When I started my very first job, my company paid me $42,500 per year. You would probably get more than that if you started today.

4. How many hours a week do you have to work?

Most of the time I work eight hours a day for five days per week. Sometimes there is just too much work to do and I need to work extra hours. This is called “crunch time” and can usually be anywhere from one extra hour a day to many extra hours. Most game dev studios try to limit crunch time from happening, but it does happen - usually when we are very close to finishing the game.

5. Was a specific class or special schooling need for your job, if so what was it?

Most game developers need a college degree. Artists need a portfolio that shows their skills. Programmers need schooling in computer science. Designers need training in game design - playing games and analyzing them to figure out what the rules are and why they were used in that way. There aren’t any specific must-have classes or degrees that someone needs to get this job, but a university education is very helpful in general.

I hope this helps!

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It is helpful but not necessary to have a degree if your goal is a career track in programming. A computer science degree isn’t very useful to an artist or animator, but it is useful for anyone who needs to interact with programming on a regular basis (e.g. engineers and some designers). I know a number of professional programmers who never obtained a computer science degree, but they were all able to demonstrate excellent programming knowledge and ability despite not having a degree. 

To a hiring manager, the point of a degree isn’t a legal requirement like a certification but more like a shorthand symbol - something that reassures us that we can assume the candidate has a certain level of understanding and competence in the field of computer science. What we’re after isn’t the degree itself so much as the ability to use the understanding and competence obtained over the course of earning that degree to do work. If a candidate can demonstrate that excellent programming knowledge and ability earned in other ways, the degree is not necessary - the candidate’s skill and knowledge is what we’re actually after.

Those engineers I mentioned that didn’t have degrees were still fantastic programmers. When we’re hiring engineers, we usually still check for candidate competency by giving a take-home programming test and ask technical questions at on-site interviews, even if the candidate has a degree. A degree isn’t going to bypass those tests - the accumulated computer science expertise that the candidate has earned will. And, of course, a computer science degree is absolutely not necessary for producers, artists, testers, and (most) designers. 

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There are several large publishers with established internship programs. Most of them are paid. None of them are remote. Activision, EA, and Ubisoft all run internship programs where you can apply via their job websites or campus outreach programs (if they have them). Some smaller publishers do their own internship programs too, like Riot. Due to their company size and the number of applicants each year, most AAA publisher internship programs start taking internship applications in the fall for the following summer.

Remote work for interns is super hard to find. Working on a game that’s on specialized hardware (e.g. a game console or mobile devices) requires you to use that specialized hardware during the development process, and most publishers aren’t going to entrust a dev kit and workstation that costs thousands of dollars to an intern with no training in a remote location without a protected network environment. Also, an intern is going to need training and mentorship, something that’s much harder when done remotely than face to face. Full-time remote work in the game industry is pretty rare in general, I only know of a handful of senior devs who managed to swing that. 

If you can’t relocate for a summer, consider reaching out to local game development studios (or even just a software company) and asking them to carve out an internship opportunity for you. This may not necessarily be a paid position, since most smaller dev studio budgets (especially indie) are stretched pretty tightly, and they may not necessarily have an opportunity for you. An internship obtained this way might not be everything you wanted, but at least you’ll be able to earn some valuable experience which will go a long way to getting you your first full-time job in the industry after you graduate. 

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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Why do you need to know math if you want to be a game designer?

Let’s say I’m working on the combat system for the next sword and sorcery RPG. How do the dexterity and agility stats affect my dodge, parry, critical hit rate, attack speed, and accuracy? How does the strength stat affect my damage? How does the vitality stat affect my defense value and health points? If I add one more point of intelligence, how much mana and spell power do I gain?

Let’s say I’m working on a class-based first person shooter. How much damage should this character do per shot? What should its cone of fire be? What’s its accuracy rate? What’s its fire rate? How long should this effect last? How long should its cooldown be? How often should this character reload? How many shots between reloading? How long should reloading take?

Let’s say I’m working on a fighting game. How much health should each character have? How much damage does this character’s light attack deal? How far does it extend? How long is the recovery time on this attack? How many frames of invincibility does this attack have? How do we ensure that there aren’t any infinite combos?

What should I learn besides math?

To be a game designer? Art, history, mythology, geography, and creative writing are pretty good to start with. When you get to college, you should probably consider programming, cognitive science, architecture, and interior design as useful subjects. You want a good understanding of how people understand and expect the world you create to work. You want to understand all the visual shorthand that’s been wired into their brains that they might not even remember. You want to know how to create an experience for the player using both familiar and new elements.

What should I do if I want to be a game designer in the future? (Like should I mod? Make games? Which language should I learn etc.)

Learn to mod games. Make your own games. Create your own levels. Try creating something with Unity, Unreal Engine, the Dragon Age Origins Toolset, the Skyrim Creation Kit, Game Maker, RPG Maker, or something. Try to create a board game or a card game. Playtest it and improve on it. Hiring managers and recruiters really look for that kind of stuff, especially finished projects.

More questions? 

Read the FAQ.

Got a burning question you want answered?

So… the first thing you should know is that you will do much better if you learn to adapt narrative to gameplay rather than trying to adapt gameplay to narrative. If you try to shoehorn gameplay in to serve as a delivery device for your epic story, I guarantee you that nobody will care because the game won’t be fun to play. This isn’t like writing a novel or a short story - the player needs to feel a sense of agency or the game won’t be any fun. If you want to work on games as a writer, you need to be a game designer first. Unless you’re working on a text-only game, players won’t ever just be reading text you write. They will be interacting with a virtual world full of sights, sounds, characters, and effects. All of these will be in play when the player interacts with your stuff, and there are no writing classes out there that will teach you how that works. The only way you’ll be able to understand and craft that experience properly is by learning how to design content. So... become a designer before being a writer. 

That said... in terms of advice for picking courses for a job as a future designer, choose whatever your major is and do that, but try to get a broad understanding of crafting a user experience. No matter what your major is, if you want to learn game design you should try to take:

Basically, you need to get good at crafting engaging and interesting experiences for somebody else. In order to make that happen, you need to understand all of the little details that add up - what the player is probably thinking at the time, how to encourage the player to do what you want and discourage from what you don’t want, what the human brain is subconsciously looking for, how the brain reacts to different kinds of visual stimuli, and a good understanding of how this sort of thing can actually be done through scripting and programming. It’s also a good idea to build up a good variety of stories and plot ideas from a breadth of sources - not just things you like. That’s what game design really is - it’s the ability to aggregate a lot of little details together to form a coherent whole experience for somebody else.

Move.

I’m serious.

If this is what you want to do for a career, then you’re going to have to pursue it. And that means you’re going to have to make sacrifices and decisions you might not otherwise make. One of them is where you live. Over the course of my career, I’ve literally moved thousands of miles for a job offer. I’ve moved across the country for work, moved back for another job, and partway in between. It isn’t easy or convenient - moving really sucks. It’s affected the home I live in, it’s affected my lifestyle and buying habits, and it’s affected my social life - it’s hard to make long-term friends if you have to move a lot.

I must admit, my personal experience is a bit outside of the overall curve on this one. Your mileage may vary, but it is one of the realities you must be prepared for. Most studios won’t hire remotely, and almost none of them are willing to hire somebody sight unseen. Unless you can prove that you’re just that valuable to them (and that’s a pretty tall order for a newcomer to the industry), you’re going to have to move out there to wherever the studio is located. Most studios will help you with the relocation costs if they commit to hiring you. Some will not. This isn’t really that different from most other careers, either - most of the time you have to go where the work is.

It comes down to a personal choice - how much do you value the career relative to the comforts of home and familiar surroundings? It isn’t just the creature comforts either, it’s your local social network. Are you willing to possibly leave your friends, family, pets, loved ones, etc. behind to pursue your career in another city? Is your significant other willing to pack up and move to be with you? There may be other issues that need to be dealt with as well - kids, a mortgage, a lease, etc. as well.

These are all hard questions that nobody but you can answer, and they have nothing to do with your skill or ability as a game developer. For some, it’s easy… but making the decision to pursue a career definitely comes with potentially unforeseen caveats. You need to consider these effects if you want to pursue this career and don’t have any local options.

If you want to be a programmer, the difficulty of learning a new programming language should not be your primary concern. If wrapping your mind around a language and its syntax is difficult for you, I would caution you against being a programmer. If you really like solving problems, thinking about things logically (in the classical sense), and making things more efficient, then software engineering might be something that works out well for you.

It all has to do with the purpose of learning a programming language. The purpose of learning a human language like French, Chinese, Russian, or English is not just to learn words and how to string them together, but to provide you with a tool or a means to communicate. If you learn a language but never read, write, or speak in that language, it does you very little good. What matters is being able to express your ideas and your knowledge through that language. It’s the same with programming languages - they are a tool or a means to solve problems. The problems that need solving are what the tool is used for. You won’t program in C++ just to program in C++, you program in C++ to solve problems like “How can I tell if player A shot player B?” and “How do I make this potted plant go flying when a rocket explodes nearby?”

That said, I would suggest that you learn C++ while you learn fundamental programming concepts. Specifically, you should focus on learning the concepts of recursion and iteration, and how these two concepts are used to solve problems. Any introductory computer science course at your local university should teach these concepts. If you find these interesting, you should move on to learning about data structures, algorithms, inheritance, architecture, and so on. But everything about computer science is based on recursion and iteration.

I said this yesterday, and I will repeat it until I die - don’t take any class that just tries to teach you a language like C++, Java, or whatever. Any class that just teaches you the language without the concepts isn’t worth your time. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the intricacies of C++, you could try studying Java. Java shares many syntactic concepts with C++, but it is a bit easier to use.