Gaming and Game Design

Hi, im a college student who's going to transfer in order to get a degree in Game Art Design. As I will be learning game art design, i also like to play video games. I was wondering what kind of setup i should have where i can design games and play them, things such as monitors, pc, ect. I play from my PS4 and as of right now my laptop(which is okay considering its just a laptop). I also plan to have a Wacom drawing pad to do flat/drawn concepts on. All sorts of opinions and answers would be very helpful and I will be beyond greatful, thank you.

 

You don't need anything fancy to design games. Much of it can be done on paper, or with spreadsheets and word processors. You definitely don't need a fancy setup for playing games in order to design them. It's best not to get the two mixed up, because while having an appreciation for games is great, playing them has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not you'll like designing them.

I would in fact suggest getting into board games if you're interested in game design. In computer games the rules are often hidden from us or glossed over, but in a board game players have to understand and directly apply the rules. That's great for you because it means you can see exactly how the game works, and how the mechanics tie together.

 

Just to clarify, are focusd on game design or game art? @angrypenguin’s answer is on the money for game design. If your goal is art it might be slightly different.

 

It depends on the art you plan on doing. Generally, the more powerful the better. Better graphics card the better. The more ram and video ram the better. Those art programs like Maya and Photoshop are resource hogs.

 

It depends on what you mean by "design games". The typical definition mostly involves document writing, example artwork, and sometimes a simple game prototype that tests a game mechanic or two. So you're usually dealing with things like a word processor and photoshop (or even MS paint for just some quick and dirty examples, like a very basic UI layout).

If by "design games" you instead meant "develop games", then you generally want something more powerful depending on what type of game you're making. More CPU cores, good video card, good amount of memory, and an SSD, generally make for a better game dev computer.

 

I recommend having at least two monitors for artwork design. It also will help with many other tasks. An rx460 is good enough for design. It's good enough for blender, as blender uses the cpu anyways. Have no less than 4 cores. Have as many cores as you can get. I have an out dated workstation that I upgraded and it has 12 cores. This is low for workstations, but big for gaming desktop. Your single core should be as fast as you can afford. Back on the gfx card, a rx 470 or RX480 is much better than the RX460. Those are Radeon, really good except the drivers are weak on Linux. The NVidia is better with the NVidia drivers in Linux. More ram is more important than fast ram, you should try for a minimum of 16GB.

Should do yourself a favor and find a nice expensive keyboard, because this job requires lots of typing.

Having a bigger screen is really helpful. I am using a 32" TV that I downgraded too from a 42". The 32" makes graphic design, and studying easier. I no longer can stand looking at a smaller screen, so a warning, it will spoil you. Not all TV have the same quality of picture. Some of them are blurry.

 

A Eizo calibrated for correct colors is my tip. And stay away from TN

 

I will be designing characters, levels(what the levels look like, lighting, landscapes, objects in the levels, ect). i wont be doing much of the programming for the game sadly this time around but i will go back around to do that degree also so i can just go ahead and make my own games as freely as i like while having the knowledge on how. Id like to develope games such as the ones you would play on a console that could also have a pc version for example Sims 4 or Monster Hunter. I will be using pencil and paper for rough sketches and writing down concepts but i mainly want to work from a desk setup with monitors.

I do love to play video games yes but it has nothing to do with my like for designing them, my like for designing them comes from seeing how beautiful the finished product is and what goes into making the levels, assets, and how it all comes together in the end. How some games are made challenging, how a story or stories are told throughout the game, have different genres to them, and how some can be leisurely fun, that right there is why i like and want to design games.

 

Both of these are great things to aim for, but they're not things you'll be doing on the same project. Games made by individuals are generally focused and small. Stuff like The Sims and Monster Hunter are made by large teams with specialists in different disciplines.

Learning a bit of everything is very much the way to go if you want to make your own games. (But, do a bit of research into solo game dev.) If you want to make big projects then you'll be a part of a team and you generally get there by having deep experience in a specific area.

I watch a lot of movies and I think the end results are gorgeous and love hearing stories about how they were made. But I don't want to make them myself.

Do you enjoy the activity of designing games for its own sake? Have you ever sat down and sketched out a level design, or written a game concept/design, or built a level in a game's modding tools? When you did that, did you want to do it again? Did you actually do it again?

 

To echo the penguin, lots of people love books, and seeing the written word come alive. But very few have the desire to actually sit down for hours every day and write bad prose they have to re-write and re-write and re-write until it's okay and on occasion good.

I don't think there's anything wrong with giving something a shot to see if it interests you, but the talk of getting degrees is cause not necessarily for concern but definitely caution. Be sure this is something you're willing to spend lots of money and time on (and thus get some return on by making a job out of it, unless you're independently wealthy) before you commit to it.

 

I have concepts/designs down that I am currently fleshing out with details right now. I have flash drives, word documents, notebooks, and sketchbooks dedicated to each game and what will go into them. Small things keep changing for them and new things i can think of for making them better keep getting added. This is an ongoing process for every day and I enjoy it to its fullest.

 

I'm already spending a lot of my time and money on this to make a career out of doing this while knowing I'm going to actually enjoy my career. Im actually working a job to put money towards this because i'm not wealthy, but I do have a means to make it happen.

 

Just so you're aware, coming up with ideas is, like, 5% of game dev. The overwhelming majority of the time is building tools or creating content.

I have an "idea" for 5 different games set within a universe I've created. But I'm not releasing a bunch of ideas on paper about this guy getting married and going off and being absorbed by (and turning into) a malevolent force the night his children are born, then his son going around and using McGuffins to release the son's mother, and his daughter then waking the first guy up, and the mother beating him into shape, then the guy saving the world, oh and there's a sci-fi game set in an alternative universe where the guy didn't become the malevolent force and that causes the world to be destroyed, so the protag of the sci-fi game has to go back in time to change things, and he becomes the malevolent force and has to fight the first guy and force him to become the malevolent force, causing him pain and sorrow, all for the sake of the world, and then when the sci-fi protag is successful he goes back to the future and the world is saved but everything he knew is gone so he's alone in the world, and in another sci-fi game a guy is trapped in a space station and HE'S the one who tells the first sci-fi protagonist he has to go back in time to save the world, and when the first sci-fi protag goes back in time for the final time and "cancels" that worldline, the second sci-fi protag basically is stuck in the void and pops out of existence.

That's all great fun. But the actual work is going into Blender and making models for buildings or other things in the game world and UV mapping and texturing them, and finding a good tool to make characters and rig them and building the backend code and gui for an RPG battle system, and building a real-time dialogue system along with immersive-sim like systems, and writing actual dialogue and game text, not just a list of cool things that happen but the actual type of writing you'd see in a book, and stuff like that, and then show it to people for feedback and realize that no one likes a certain feature I really like, so it needs to be either tweaked or removed completely, which means I need to re-design the gameplay to accommodate that.

Again, I don't want you to think people don't want you to make games. Just be aware that what you've been doing is not reeeeeally making games. And it's unbelievably easy to come up with grand and intricate ideas but far, far harder to execute them, which is why I have an idea for 5 different games set within a universe and only about 15 minutes of content thus far for any of them.

Go into this with your eyes open, if nothing else.

 

Great suggestion...
in my college program Design 1 was a pretty brutal crash course in board games, dice based games, turn based games. It is more cerebral than you might think to make a fun game of that type. I went through the trouble of having miniatures, designing a huge map, having traps... stats, dice rolling, etc for my final... but not too complicated so that someone couldn't pick it up and play it. I had to pitch it within a set amount of time and was graded accordingly - like I was selling it to a company. It was definitely a learning experience. This had nothing to do with computers, aside from me designing the cards and printing them in Photoshop and designing a board that I had laminated on card stock at an office supply store.

It was very interesting to see who sunk and who swam. From a design standpoint this isn't a bad place to start.

 

My hits on the computer was based on doing graphic design, with the production of 3d models. It can be done with an outdated computer, if all you are doing is design. But if you want to produce 3d models, it would help to have more power. If your going to be working for companies, then you will have to depend on windows.

 

Multiple monitors in the only non-stock thing I think you need. Any laptop you buy is capable of running Blender, GIMP, and a compiler simultaneously. 2048x2048s might lag a little, but how often do you really need those? Lighting calculations, baking... all those things you can wait for. I don't think it's worth it to spend an extra $500 to save a minute or two here and there.

Absolutely dual boot with Linux. Games aren't just front-end applications. Almost all of them have servers doing things behind the scenes and a big part of design is designing that. Those servers absolutely are LAMP, not Windows.

 

Okay.
Use what you have for now and buy what you can afford.
Don't burn yourself out, with trying to buy all sorts of stuff, because
that can sometimes, overwhelm you in some cases.

The Wacom tablet is a good idea. That will come in handy for
drawing stuff, and sculpting 3d objects.

Okay. I'm curious. What are your laptops specs?

 

Ok, in the future when you tell people you're into game design, lead with this.

As has already been mentioned, ideas aren't important. I'm not going to parrot on about why, these two articles have it covered already:

• You Have An Idea for a Game - Here's Why Nobody Cares
• Sorry, There Is No "Idea Guy" Position in the Games Industry

Make sure you read those, but if you really are doing what you describe above keep in mind that you're already a solid step above almost everybody else in that regard.

The next step is to start making games. As previously mentioned, board games are great for this because they require basically no technical skill, and from a design perspective they're as pure and direct as you can get. For video games in particular, a great starting point is implementing classic games with some kind of twist. Small games, because as a designer it's critical that you get them to the point where other people can play them ASAP - because your sole and whole job is to craft experiences for other people.

At that point, you'll review this statement...

... and realise that it's just the the light shining under the door. Writing documents is an important skill that lots of people overlook, to their detriment. But maintaining a game's design during and through production is a whole other thing again.

But you enjoy it, so you'll do well as long as you listen to and learn from those around you.

Stop reading my rambling and start making games.

 

Game design doesn't begin on the couch with a controller, it's a mindset and a lifestyle. Sure, people can play games all they like, but it doesn't teach you how to create problems for others to solve. The game design mindset begins with understanding the entire production pipeline. You need to take some time and research this.

The objective about learning the pipeline is knowing who on your team handles what types of assets during the 6 stages of production. (It used to be 3, the education system is very antiquated).: Pre-Viz, Pre-Production, Production, Post-Production, Q.A., and Marketing. (Just to let you guys in on a secret, most rookie game companies miss the last 2 because they don't think it's necessary so early on. 1) If the games broken, no one will play it and 2) if its not appealing to the market, it won't sell. Marketing gives the team a budget WHILE the game is in production. Your game depends on it, which is why it is now within the production pipeline). The only thing that is really left out is step 7, which is distribution (this is another story for a different day).

If you don't have an Asset Control List, which is an inventory and library of all your assets, you can't throw the player off. Players want to be, need to be, and demand challenge, so you have to know what the level is doing. This requires great planning. If you wing it, you can burn your budget during post and Q.A.

Let me be clear on my first statement so it's not taken out of context. It is possible to play a game and learn the level design, however, the Level Designer has the mindset you're looking for. Don't study the level to solve to problem. Study it to get inside the designers head so that you can create the problem. This might help:

Step 1, Pick the controller up, you put aside fan-boy mentality and put on an apprentice's hat.
Step 2, Take extensive notes combined with massive action and inventory every single asset that you see in the level that you like.
Step 3, Categorize the assets to the best of your ability. Typically there are 6 major types of assets:
---
Actors (any type of skinned mesh that the player uses: animals/monsters/humans)
Transportation (land, sea, air,)
Dynamic Weapons (Any prop that has animated parts, like a gun)
---
Environments (foliage, skybox, water, terrain)
Architecture (interior/exterior [] commercial, residential, industrial, f.o.b.)
Static Props (swords, benches, etc.)

Typically artists can only do 2 of the 6 REALLY well. I think Game Designers make some of the best business owners in the industry because they seem to know all of the content is needed.

Step 4, Don't pick up the strategy guide yet. Manually draw out the entire level and note where cover and dips in the terrain are. It makes things interesting for the player and it mixes things up.

Step 5, Check your work against the strategy guide's map and level. If you did it correctly, you'll have written more info down than the map provided. This means you took great notes.

Step 6. Keep a binder of all your hard work and use it in your portfolio.

This sounds difficult right? Just remember this: Rich people have easy lives because they do what is difficult. Poor people do what is easy and that's why they have difficult lives. One of my mentors taught me that.

Did any of your teachers teach you these things in school by any chance?

I hope this helps, Shalom!

- Michah'El Dan'Atah

Michael@YHWHGames.com

 

Suggest having mobile device on hand to 'play' smaller games that can be reviewed for game design purposes, easier and faster.
Also strongly consider starting off designing smaller games - such as games published on mobile platforms and game portals, as they are easier to begin with as a new, starting out designer, and those games will be what you eventually start creating.
Sims and Monster Hunter is out of reach for rookie designers. A new designer could - maybe - paper prototype something like Monster Hunter, but the result would most likely be a 'low-fi' attempt of a MH game.

Also look into the different terminology between design and development. As indie creators these terms/phases blur together a bit, but it is important to separate them and know the differences for learning purposes.