Game Design short introduction
This page is dedicated to introduce you to Game design/Planing/Managing with:
basic ideas, some terms, techniques,idioms, workflows you should learn and practice in the way of game/software developing.
I will keep it short but concise!
Wisdoms and Insights with Images
Doing it right!
The Process and elements
Use UML & List & Tree and Graph
Line up gameplay's element for better overview first
Care about player input and experience, motion and emotion,inspired by them!
Teamwork and share, hubris is the gamekiller!
Books to read
Try to google them please!
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Game Architecture and Design
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Game Design Foundations
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Game Design Theory and Practice
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Game Development and Production
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Ultimate Game Design Building Game Worlds
Tips
If you are not a professional game designer developer, or not in a “restricted workflow, or even you are, here is some tips:
Thing to keep near
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Papers & Pencils
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Your search engine
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Game dev books
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Open sources & Free softwares
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Good kind of musics
Smart workflow
As developer
try Extreme programing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming
As designer
As an artist
See 4 phase I recommended below as my experience manage a small team:
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2D Concept
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Outline: sketch first, dicuss a lot about ideas, be wild
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Coloring: get as much of details as you can
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3D Modeling
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Draft: T-Pose, Simple geometry, basic lighting
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Detail: with clean up textures, maps, shaders, better scuplting, animation
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As Indie & As one man army
If you never in a professinal workflow before, try to do it simplier as your only have limited man power. Most valuable advice if you’re an artist do programming: Do it like Zen :p
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Smart and active: Research first, try to call out for help if need! Opensource are the key.
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Flexible but manageable: Try to use SVN.
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Shoot with both hands: Do both assets and programming can cause a mesh, do one at a time. After finish review, get approved by yourself or the leader. Continue developing.
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Pirate spirit: Use place holder as much as your can. Skip concept, may use existed assets. There are plenty of free assets.
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Avoid premature optimization: If still concerning about design, make it work first. When doubt lelf out.
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WYSIWYG : What You See Is What You® (Get| Got| Goodat | Goingto | Goal )
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KISS : Keep It Simple Stupid! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
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Management tips
Time constraints
With any workflow and model your team choose, keep in mind this to get high quality artworks in short limit of time, keep phase (a duration of development) tight, as my personal experiences:
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Concept phase The more the better researches and ideas in short/afforable time!
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Design phase The detailed the better/look ahead solutions and architecture in rather long time.
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Implementaion phase The focus, intensive and “make it work first time.
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Review phase Reviews and test, fix , always take long time, but do it frequently or you are doomed!!!
Phases and its expected result
So, in the end of each phase, you want to estimate your objectives and performane successes with a simple test/checklist . Here is “common expected result:
Concept phase Ideas → Gameplay
Design phase Gameplay → Screens
Implementation phase Screen → States [or other paradigms] → Codes (class,config)
Review phase Runs → Bugs → Patches → Deployed publishabe packages, game.
Design as first step!
In this phase, we will design the most important things have influence to our game:
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Gameplay
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Screens
Consider, gameplay brief texts is the initial basic “outline, and the screens are the detailed sketches of the gameplay into a “software form (that’s it, a game :p).
In the scale of whole project
This article talking about pre-production and other durations
Useful terms
Gameplay
A list of “names or “things will be seen in our game, bricks that build up the gameplay piece by piece.
As shortlist
Yeah, a real text list of names, short description and notes!
For examples, in a Football Manager game, as my EuroKick game kickgame You can see them as things:
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a Football fan see a football match in a stadium*.
or
a business man see a company with finance, reports and statistics.
As Mindmapping
In mind mapping, the links between the names represent various kind relationships such as “Has - “Belong to , “In category… or unknown as they just poped out of our mind.
Design to Programming translation
Those, in turn will be implemented in programming language with a programming manner.
OOP for specific, appropriate name should be transfer to a appropriate Class of Object, with properties and methods.
For Component Oriented Programming (COP), names should be interpreted as Prefab with a specific set of components, and their processors. Read : entitysystem
Userful tools
Online Docs and Repository
To writing corporate documentations
Google doc http://doc.google.com Google code http://code.google.com
Github
Mindmap
Mind map can be consider very simple and basic ideas of the game in Graph based presentation, simplest Game Design document…
Go to Text2Mindmap.com http://www.text2mindmap.com/ and build one… !
Open source projects
Google code http://code.google.com Source forge http://sourceforge.com