When I was younger, I remember a lot of my friends and acquaintances were interested in game design. Some told me they simply wanted to be a play tester. Playing games all day would be their dream job. I’m sorry to disappoint you guys and girls out there; it’s not as easy as it seems to be.
Personally, I’m an artist. I love drawing and getting my ideas down on paper. They range from just aimless swirls to trying to draw a complex human figure. I’m still learning, but currently my classes are a lot of programming and more focused on how to understand the function of a game. I have made some really basic games on the engine Processing, which has allowed me to get a lot of experience play-testing my own games. It’s definitely more of a chore than fun. When you play a game, you experience the finished product and it's fun because you are playing more than one part of the game.
With play testing, many times you're testing the same part of the game and making sure there’s no glitches or bugs in it. This is very important- I don't think you would want to play a game that was glitching all the time.
I want to get into the art design part of gaming which may sound easier, but it still requires a lot of work and effort to get to the finished product. Although I haven’t taken any art classes yet, I have had experience with Photoshop and that itself is a challenge if you don’t know what you're doing.
You have to make several drafts and many edits to your original work before you get a great final product that you can use for the final draft. It's a lot like animation, however it's much easier because you can have a 3D model that moves and just make edits to that instead of editing several different images to make up the movement. That method is also used in many different things like gifs.
When it comes to anybody thinking about becoming a game designer or any job in that field, you have to be good with computers. It's a lot easier when you know how to work today's advancing technology. The game field is evolving so quickly; the engines that you work on and the language of code that you use are always changing. You have to really like games to truly enjoy game design. It seems like an obvious statement, but it really does make learning and coding so much more fun to be involved with. You also need to work well in groups and be able to get your ideas across to other people. In the gaming industry and in movies, there are so many people running the project and because of this you need to be able to communicate with each other and give feedback and criticism when it's needed. It’s alright to be shy at first (I'm quite shy) but you just have to remember that your feedback means a lot to your partners, future coworkers and future bosses. You can't let your shyness get in the way and hide behind a wall. Once you are comfortable you will realize how much easier it is to communicate with other people. Always remember that your ideas are unlike anyone else's, so if you don't give your own feedback to another person's work, they won't be able to see your point of view.
