game designer's guide

• game design is the discipline/science/art responsible for creating the game itself.
• it's the creative process, done alongside market research, in which a person comes up with ideas, documents them and decides which of those ideas will be used.
• besides producing a solid concept for the game that's going to be developed, game design also defines, as clearly as possible, the rules, mechanics and systems the game will have.

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No matter what kind of game you're developing, there are some basic concepts you'll always use in your game design. Here's a list of the main ones 👇

• Core Loop Gameplay
• Mechanics
• Systems
• Flow
• Bartle's Archetypes
• 3Cs (Character, Controller, Camera)
• Feedbacks (Juice)
• Immersion
• Rewards
• Accessibility
• Economy
• Iteration
• Prototyping

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• In case you don't know the acronym, GDD stands for "Game Design Document".
• This document will be essential for you as a GD when creating your game, and for everyone else on the team working on it besides the Game Designer. In it you'll document everything your game will have:
  • Rules
  • Mechanics
  • Systems
  • Characters
  • Etc
• Since every game is its own case, GDDs end up being different depending on the context you're working in.

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• A framework is nothing more than a structure. A structure that gives us direction on how to build or study something.
• Game design frameworks are structures that give us direction and predefined ways to study and analyze games whenever we need to.
• It's worth knowing and applying frameworks in our studies whenever we play a game to analyze it: with the limits and structure each framework sets, we can understand specific elements of each game in more depth and break down mechanics, dynamics, rules, systems and anything else more easily.
• There are many different game design frameworks; you can learn and read more about some of them below.

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• A system is a set of mechanics that takes an input (condition) and results in an output (effect).
• Systems also have a set of rules and parameters.
• There are countless kinds of systems you can create in games, but they all follow the same premise: they combine mechanics, rules and parameters and turn them into an organized structure of patterns the player uses throughout the experience.

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• Level Design is the part of game development that is 100% focused on creating levels and every detail within that discipline.
• The process of creating a level varies a lot depending on the genre, the size of the game and the team developing it.

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• One of the most useful tools for a Game Designer.
• With this tool, you can:
  • Organize the game's content
  • Balance the game
  • Analyze user metrics
  • And much more

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• Every game, regardless of genre or any other detail, needs some kind of balancing. That's where the Game Designer comes in, deciding which direction the game will take and balancing it according to their design decisions.
• Whatever the game's genre and pitch, the game designer will most likely have to balance it and deal with things like:
  • Economy balancing
  • Enemy/boss balancing
  • Level balancing
  • Progression balancing
  • Systems balancing
  • Balancing the game's overall difficulty
  • etc

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• To work in game development you'll need to learn version control software, which lets you work with entire teams on the same project at the same time.
• The tool studios usually use is Git, and there are many solutions to view, change and push files with git, such as:
  • Git Batch
  • Github Desktop
  • Gitlab
  • Bitbucket
  • Fork
  • Etc
• Below you'll learn how Git works and how to use it day to day, and then how to apply it in a game development context.

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• As a Game Designer you'll have to pick one or more engines (the software used to develop games) for your daily work.
• Each engine has strengths and weaknesses depending on what you want to do, so it's worth checking out each one to see which makes the most sense for your context and your specific game.
• Below are links to the main engines for you to check out.

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