Overview
Game design starts with an idea, often a modification on an existing concept. The game idea may fall within one or several genres. Designers often experiment with mixing genres. The game designer usually produces an initial game proposal document containing the concept, gameplay, feature list, setting and story, target audience, requirements and schedule, staff and budget estimates.
Many decisions are made during the course of a game's development about the game's design; it is the responsibility of the designer to decide which elements will be implemented, based on, for example, consistency with the game's vision, budget or hardware limitations. Design changes may have a significant positive or negative impact on required resources.
The designer may use scripting languages to implement and preview design ideas without necessarily modifying the game's codebase.
A game designer often plays video games and demos to follow the game market development.
It is common for the game designer's name to misleadingly be given an undue amount of association to the game, neglecting the rest of the development team.
Funding game publishers must be taken into account, who may have specific expectations from a game as most video games are market-driven — developed to sell for profit. However, if financial issues do not influence designer's decisions, the game becomes design- or designer-driven; few games are designed this way because of lack of funding. Alternatively, a game may be technology-driven, such as Quake (1996), to show off a particular hardware achievement or to market the game engine. Finally, rarely a game may be art-driven, such as Myst (1993), mainly to show off impressive visuals designed by artists.
In The Study of Games, Brian Sutton-Smith writes:
| “ | Each person defines games in his own way — the anthropologists and folklorists in terms of historical origins; the military men, businessmen,and educators in terms of usages; the social scientists in terms of psychological and social functions. There is overwhelming evidence in all this that the meaning of games is, in part, a function of the ideas of those who think about them. ...
... A game designer is a particular kind of designer, much like a graphic designer, industrial designer, or architect. A game designer is not necessarily a programmer, visual designer, or project manager, although sometimes he or she can also play these roles in the creation of a game. A game designer might work alone or as part of a larger team. A game designer might create card games, social games, video games, or any other kind of game. The focus of a game designer is designing game play, conceiving and designing rules and structures that result in an experience for players. Thus game design, as a discipline, requires a focus on games in and of themselves. Rather than placing games in the service of another field such as sociology, literary criticism, or computer science, our aim is to study games within their own disciplinary space. Because game design is an emerging discipline, we often borrow from other areas of knowledge — from mathematics and cognitive science; from semiotics and cultural studies. We may not borrow in the most orthodox manner, but we do so in the service of helping to establish a field of game design proper. |
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