As I said, it requires certain parts of "art", but a lot of it is just "science". At it's core, you use "science" to influence your player, to lead him around your game, to make him react in certain ways and to create certain emotions within him. Or rather, let's call it psychology. Movies do the same to the viewer, they use music, cuts and actors. There is no "perfect way of doing a game", that is right. But there are certain things, that can guarantee you to succeed. Look at Modern Warfare and you already have a good example for a core-formula for a blockbuster. Cheesy patriotism storyline, lots of kaboom, a little bit of controversial content, and a ton of guns. Works in Hollywood too. Sure, you got a good chunk of "art" that factors into it, but a lot of it is "science". 70% of what you do, is "science", research and mostly hard work (even the work that the actual Artists do - you know, the guys that do all the real, traditional art). The other 25% are a good chunk of imagination, talent and experience. 5% is just pure luck.
@Reaper872: Go
Not yet, thank god. I hate kids. Might happen in the next 5 years though *shudders* Women, they control us! And don't underestimate kids. A 6 year old knows more about a computer than you might think. More than most parents for sure. They grow up with them now.
A 6 year old, sure. What about a 4 year old? Anyway, that does make a lot more sense now that you said it's about mind games. Give the player situations that test them so they see what they are made of, make them unsure, give them an emotional ride. SO THATS WHY YOU SEE PLOT STYLES GETTING BORING, they are needed to create these feelings. One counterexample I have for you on the topic of movies however, Avatar. I consider good special effects to be sort of artistic. Well thanks for replying :)
One counterexample I have for you on the topic of movies however, Avatar. I consider good special effects to be sort of artistic. Well thanks for replying :)
Special Effects are made by ARTISTS. 3D Artists. CG Artists. You name them. The whole of Pandora was created by ARTISTS. James Cameron just wrote a document for them to go by and communicated his vision. That's what we do, kinda. Vision keeping.
And I met a 4 year old that could start up Windows and log into it. It happens.
I met a 12yr old who did a 400 page presentation about apple. True story, it was pretty funny. It wasn't a super real presentation, it was like a picture and one sentence per page, but you get the picture.
Being that discussions on game design are to me what cookies are to the Cookie Monster I will play my hand.
Firstly, I very much like the term "recreation" because of its implications. When two wolf pups engage in recreation they are recreating a serious battle of life-and-death, learning and adapting to the rules of the earth every step of the way. Of course even basic biology teaches that the act of play is hinged upon the learning process, so this should invariably hold true for all forms of recreation.
In this light it becomes woefully apparent that video games offer very little practical knowledge compared to a blow to the head and a face full of snow, but even a mountain of trivial information (such as unit costs and tech trees) may serve as a conduit for a monumentally crucial skill: the ability to apply knowledge. I consider this a core tenet in the "easy to learn, difficult to master" mantra and a deciding factor in the quality of any game.
Yes, I am asserting that the quality of a game may be accurately quantified by its ability to pique the player's enthusiasm for problem solving.
I should point out that I am willfully disregarding the visceral, artistic aspects of game design in the above assessments. I consider a discussion on the joy and splendor of creation to be wholly insurmountable.
@TheZizz: Go
Games, at least for people, aren't really meant to teach you anything practical. Games are meant to entertain you. You will learn a little bit out of them (so did you learn a bit when playing Hide & Seek or Catch) but they're not meant to do that, at their core. While we all wish for Games to become some kind of art or teaching tool, most of them don't need or want to be that, at all. There are Serious Games. They're used (in combination with special equipment) to teach people things. For example, there are games, that are used to help children to have fun while learning to walk again, after having an accident. If you ever broke your leg, you know the idea. Your brain forgot how to use your goddamn leg, and it's annoying. There is also games to help medical personal to learn things. Driving trainers. Stuff like that. They're not really "Games" in the term of a AAA product, but they, to some degree, do what Games do. It's like Documentations on the TV, compared to that regular action-show.
But, you get something out of it. It does depend on what you play, but it teaches you to solve problems easier, to manage multiple tasks, it increases your reaction time and makes your mind a little bit better overall. At least nobody tried to teach us that killing people is bad, by shooting our closest friends in the face, right?
There is always entertainment and there is learning. Be it games, books or film. There is a difference between Quality here. One is of high quality, because it entertained you, you had fun with it. The other one is of high quality, because it taught you a new skill, was easy to understand and still added a high amount of important knowledge to your brain.
And there is no "splendor of creation". It managed to create humans, that says a lot about the stupidity of it.
School is for learning; games are for playing. In the most general sense though, I do agree with TheZizz. Everything critical is a problem (MW2 = kill + don't die) in a way. There are exceptions (RPG) of course. In other words, if there is nothing to aspire towards then there is nothing worth playing.
Well, I consider entertainment, play and recreation to be equivalent and steeped in the same desire for knowledge. Is the desire for stimuli and the desire to absorb information not one and the same? Even the most lazy and insipid man is not content to stare into nothingness for any period of time; on the contrary, he will be all the more voracious for his intellectual starvation, as his increasingly frantic search manifests itself in the form of TV/game addiction.
My posit is simply this: Learning is not necessarily fun, but fun is necessarily learning.
Or to put it another way, you can't have fun without learning something. The thing learned can be useless and even false; it makes no difference.
As an aside, I must vehemently advise against the self-hatred of the human race.
Game Design is not something anyone can do... As you all can guess, it's a job as a whole. So there are a few things that you can't learn just by being a "player with keen eyes". A game designer is not an artist, he's more of a project leader because he needs to create everything from A to Z and make sure it is good to play. He also ensures his idea is done, and can be done, by the team (actually he watches over every single aspect of the production). As a game designer you have to know:
-who's your target: If your game has teddy bears in it, even with machine guns, don't try to sell it to people over 30-40 years old. A misleading on this could ruin your project pretty fast because the ones you made the game for won't like it. I have a good example about this: Totally Spies 3 DS. I worked on that game, it was supposed to be a game for 5-10 year old girls, but truth is even hardcore gamers were unable to finish it because it was too hard and the combat mode was too hard to understand and play... Epic fail. You will have to think your GDD the best way depending on your target... Actually, using already existing games as a reference can help you a lot. But don't overdo it, your game must not be a clone of another game.
-what's the genre: RTS, RPG, TPS, race, platform, adventure, crossover, serious game,... all these genre follow different rules, which is precisely why we differentiate them. There are a few steps for each of these which are mandatory, playing with genres is rare and dangerous... It can either be a huge success or a total mess, so be careful about which genre your game is. If the game uses a licence from a movie, game, or book, the choice of a genre is an even more important step. Most of the noobish GDs often forget this step and end up with a project which takes a few part of this genre here, and a few parts of that genre there... The result is a huge shit, while their goal was to make "the most awesome game ever, featuring zombies in space jumping on mushrooms to gain experience for using powerful guns which will help them attack the city to steal new levitation modules for their racing spaceships". Each of these game types have RULES. Don't even think of creating your own, it's been forever that way and there is a reason: it WORKS that way. A good game is fun because it uses/play with the rules of its genre cleverly. From a good use of these rules comes the fun factor of your game.
-how to write a GDD: The Game Design is the bible of your game. Everyone in the team needs this document, because it contains EVERY single aspect of your game (controls schemes, cameras behaviors, characters and their behaviors, list of animations, plans of levels, SFXs-VFXs list, musics, texts, cinematics, interfaces, AI, storyline...). You don't need to be a pro in each of these fields, but at least you need to know what can be done and what cannot. The list I just gave doesn't even show you a third of what it needs to contain. A GDD will even specify how sounds behave (can they be they cut, looped, when do they launch and why?), you have to ask yourself a lot of questions about how everything works together.
You can't think of all aspects if you're just a player, a huge majority of them don't even know how complex a game is, they never thought pressing a key does not only move a character but also changes its animation, locks the use of another key, launches a sound, moves a camera,... and so on... GDDs are often 200-300 pages long, with pictures, boards, lists, and everything you can think of to make it easy to understand and read. For example, the GDD for Age of Mythology was more than 500 pages long (I still have nightmares about it!). The best way to understand what is inside a GDD is to actually download the GDD of a best-seller. Any triple A game will do.
-how to write a "look and feel" document: the Look and Feel is some sort of GDD about how your game actually looks. How the interfaces are designed, where do you put 3D and where there is only 2D, how big are the buttons, and fonts, which size are the characters on screen, how the terrains look, what are the textures size for terrain and for models, how many polygons per model, which format for sounds and music,... This is the graphical part, the hard part is that you have to create screenshots of your own non-existing game... :D This is the part where you describe what the player will see, how he must feel about your game (where is it sad? where is there action? what to think of each character?)... Same advice as above, the best way to know the content of a L&F is to download one from an AAA game.
These steps are mandatory IMO, there are still a few other matters but you will cover most of the aspects of a game with these. A huge part of the GDD is about the game mechanics, so you need a good knowledge of video games but also the curiosity to check how things work. You need to have a feeling for details too.
In the end, when you are used to design games you will see how mechanics are done while you play, while other players don't. How many players actually realized there is acceleration and deceleration on EACH units in SC2? I'm pretty sure that, except mappers, only a few of them noticed. This is the kind of things you must be aware of as a game designer. Don't forget brainstormings too, which are a good way to see where your idea works and where it doesn't, and also to help you improve your game. Do not brainstorm too much though, or you will never do anything.
Game Design is not something anyone can do... As you all can guess, it's a job as a whole. So there are a few things that you can't learn just by being a "player with keen eyes". A game designer is not an artist, he's more of a project leader because he needs to create everything from A to Z and make sure it is good to play. He also ensures his idea is done, and can be done, by the team (actually he watches over every single aspect of the production). As a game designer you have to know:
Guess what, business (project leader) is an art too! Something tells me your definition of art is too narrow. Even you admit it is something not everyone can do. There is a certain knack needed that no amount of practice can achieve. This is not so much the case with science.
It's from the game Uplink. Some might know it - it's a fun game where you take the role of a hacker and hack yourself through da interweb.
It's the first game from Introvision Software, so it's not a 500-pages heavy mountain to read through, but it conveys the right idea and way to do it.
True enough... I tend to consider something is a piece of art only when I can see the result. Paintings, dancing, playing music is obviously art, but I often forget that you can consider "art" everything that needed both hard work and a "certain knack" (to quote your own words). :)
I just noticed I forgot to talk about milestones. You also do lots of these when you design a game, I think there are at least 3 milestones to do. You basically need them to summarize in a few pages how is your project evolving. The more milestones you write, the sooner you will know when something is wrong in your GDD. If something seems impossible to do (ie. there was not much progress done since the previous milestone) it might mean you have to change a few things. That's important to always improve your GDD, everyone makes mistakes/bad choices, and it's not rare to forget something when you write hundreds of pages...
Personally, I think game designing definition is pretty simple: make something fun. Of course, making something fun isn't that simple.
Later, depending on the nature of the game, you could need to design patrons and levels to advance the game, and the focus here may go to adapting the changing art to the gameplay, because when making new content you should make new art, and keep the fun changing the environment and the possibilities, or you're just repeating yourself.
Personally, I think I'm a decent game designer, but I have so many ideas and so much stuff in my head I never get to depict anything clearly. I think my ideas would be awesome and whatnot, but they're always too ambitious. Maybe I'm just a good "gameplay designer", I don't know. I have a lot of problems with symmetry, for example, cause my perfectionism makes me do everything very artificial :S.
As for game design being art, of course it is, it's like if you were an engineer, only that you work with ideas instead of physics.
My main idea about game design is is this: take a game or a series of games you love, and analyze them. You love them because they're awesome, nope? but they're not perfect, because they never are. Search those "flaws" and remake the game/s into a single game of your own, try to correct the errors of the developers. I find that a lot of games out there, games that are great, have "stupid" errors in control, cameras, etc. I don't know, but I feel I could stand up and yell "hey, that's wrong!", which makes me wonder why their boss wasn't able to in the first place. I think I'm good mostly because of that, but maybe I'm ignoring technical difficulties.. after all, saying and doing are pretty different from each other.
In the end, make something fun, that's all. If you have played a lot of games, you won't need any theory (although would be nice to give it a check to polish your project). If you're a gamer, you'll design perfectly most of the time.
Whatever, me and my deliriums.
Edit: Uh, I'm shit at balance, too. It's just hard for me >_< :P.
Game design itself can not be explained through math or science. It is turning what is in your head into a visual and playable senerio. It takes skill, knowledge, and a whole lot of math and knowing what makes games fun. Reason I say math is computers use formulas to understand what you are telling them to do. THAT part of design is pure "science". What isn't science is tweaking an idea and making it appeal to different groups of people in similar ways. The part I get stuck on is inspiration. If I can't quite see what I want, how can I make it? When I look for inspiration in the work of others, it makes my origional idea seem primitave and crude. So, I guess making a good senerio is a balance between doing what you like, appealing to mass players, and still making something that isn't terribly overused.
@ZealNaga: Go I have to disagree on some topics :p
Mixing different Genre should be done. If done well, it does something good. Had RTS not been mended with RPG, we would never have gained some very interesting titles, WC3 among them. You should, naturally, decide what your game is at heart - RTS or RPG. Otherwise you end up with something like Spellforce. And new Genre's showed up, because some people took these steps. The self-proclaimed "MOBA"-Genre, as well as "TD" among them, though most handle them as RTS games at the moment. Will take some time, but it'll probably change soon.
"Look & Feel" Document sounds more like an Artbible combined with elements of the GDD to me. Depends on the company, I'd guess. Everyone does their job a little different.
By what I've seen & experienced up to date, there is at least 20 Milestones, if not more. Not directly related to the Publisher presentation, but to your own ends. Every other week, most of the stuff gets sorted through, at least here. Again, everyone does it their way.
@Karawasa: Go I think your definition of "Art" is a bit to broad in this case. I've never seen "We're looking for a Game Design Artists" in my job descriptions. We're more Visionaries, similar to what Engineers do, not really "Artists" by what we do. We have a Vision. We do not build the parts of it, we do not sculpt it with our own hands (at least not all of it). So, we're Visionaries. Like the guy who wrote the Bible and got rich. And my hate against 90% of my own race is born out of facts. Maybe I've been too exposed to George Carlin when I just started to learn English :p
If you're a gamer, you'll design perfectly most of the time.
No, you won't. Gamers are horrible designers, until they see patterns and know what their team requires from them. Trust me, I saw people walk into the first Student project that didn't know shit about it and just played before, without any use of any editor in existence. The pain.
Edit: Uh, I'm shit at balance, too. It's just hard for me >_< :P.
Well if you say that, you`ll always be @#@%^ at it.
You know, Another thing about being a game designer is you need a good amount of confidence and determination. Hesitation or doubt in yourself will just screw everything up.
I made a few maps for Warcraft 3. My first map was as good as could possibly be at the time of my skill(Kinda bad;p), But afterward I was determined to make future maps better. So, a cycle occurred, that I would better my previous maps considerably in terms of quality and design. Even to this day, I push myself to the very limit of my capability, and then some more.
And not to boast or anything, but I definitely consider myself an expert on balancing. Been doing it for ages, kept telling myself it was easy and that Im good at it, and naturally it becomes like second nature to you. So yeah, confidence is really important.
And my hate against 90% of my own race is born out of facts.
Of course it goes without saying that perceived facts are the foundation of any philosophy or religion, no matter how tenuous. But I say to you, the only things that ever came from hate are the very things that you use to justify your hatred!
Of course it goes without saying that perceived facts are the foundation of any philosophy or religion, no matter how tenuous. But I say to you, the only things that ever came from hate are the very things that you use to justify your hatred!
I'd actually like a big, long philosophical discussion on human nature. Some other time, when I'm awake enough. And it doesn't derail a thread. And hatred doesn't "come" from anything. Hatred just is. It's part of human nature, the faster you embrace it, the easier it becomes to life and not the fuck care about being nice and pleasing every goddamn idiot that crosses your path. But, as I said, let's discuss that some other time in another thread.
And yes, the basic idea behind playing was, to teach something to people. We still learn from games, it's just not as practical as the original intent of nature was. But it doesn't have to be teaching always. As I said, Serious Games do a good job at the whole "Play & Learn" approach. Hell, they even made a simulator for surgery practice on a digital object that gave you a frigging high-score if you did a perfect job. You just have to make those, but those only fill a small part of the market, the majority wants action & mind-numbing shooter products.
As I said, it requires certain parts of "art", but a lot of it is just "science". At it's core, you use "science" to influence your player, to lead him around your game, to make him react in certain ways and to create certain emotions within him. Or rather, let's call it psychology. Movies do the same to the viewer, they use music, cuts and actors. There is no "perfect way of doing a game", that is right. But there are certain things, that can guarantee you to succeed. Look at Modern Warfare and you already have a good example for a core-formula for a blockbuster. Cheesy patriotism storyline, lots of kaboom, a little bit of controversial content, and a ton of guns. Works in Hollywood too. Sure, you got a good chunk of "art" that factors into it, but a lot of it is "science". 70% of what you do, is "science", research and mostly hard work (even the work that the actual Artists do - you know, the guys that do all the real, traditional art). The other 25% are a good chunk of imagination, talent and experience. 5% is just pure luck.
@Reaper872: Go Not yet, thank god. I hate kids. Might happen in the next 5 years though *shudders* Women, they control us! And don't underestimate kids. A 6 year old knows more about a computer than you might think. More than most parents for sure. They grow up with them now.
@Gorandor: Go
A 6 year old, sure. What about a 4 year old? Anyway, that does make a lot more sense now that you said it's about mind games. Give the player situations that test them so they see what they are made of, make them unsure, give them an emotional ride. SO THATS WHY YOU SEE PLOT STYLES GETTING BORING, they are needed to create these feelings. One counterexample I have for you on the topic of movies however, Avatar. I consider good special effects to be sort of artistic. Well thanks for replying :)
Special Effects are made by ARTISTS. 3D Artists. CG Artists. You name them. The whole of Pandora was created by ARTISTS. James Cameron just wrote a document for them to go by and communicated his vision. That's what we do, kinda. Vision keeping.
And I met a 4 year old that could start up Windows and log into it. It happens.
@Gorandor: Go
I met a 12yr old who did a 400 page presentation about apple. True story, it was pretty funny. It wasn't a super real presentation, it was like a picture and one sentence per page, but you get the picture.
Being that discussions on game design are to me what cookies are to the Cookie Monster I will play my hand.
Firstly, I very much like the term "recreation" because of its implications. When two wolf pups engage in recreation they are recreating a serious battle of life-and-death, learning and adapting to the rules of the earth every step of the way. Of course even basic biology teaches that the act of play is hinged upon the learning process, so this should invariably hold true for all forms of recreation.
In this light it becomes woefully apparent that video games offer very little practical knowledge compared to a blow to the head and a face full of snow, but even a mountain of trivial information (such as unit costs and tech trees) may serve as a conduit for a monumentally crucial skill: the ability to apply knowledge. I consider this a core tenet in the "easy to learn, difficult to master" mantra and a deciding factor in the quality of any game.
Yes, I am asserting that the quality of a game may be accurately quantified by its ability to pique the player's enthusiasm for problem solving.
I should point out that I am willfully disregarding the visceral, artistic aspects of game design in the above assessments. I consider a discussion on the joy and splendor of creation to be wholly insurmountable.
@TheZizz: Go Games, at least for people, aren't really meant to teach you anything practical. Games are meant to entertain you. You will learn a little bit out of them (so did you learn a bit when playing Hide & Seek or Catch) but they're not meant to do that, at their core. While we all wish for Games to become some kind of art or teaching tool, most of them don't need or want to be that, at all. There are Serious Games. They're used (in combination with special equipment) to teach people things. For example, there are games, that are used to help children to have fun while learning to walk again, after having an accident. If you ever broke your leg, you know the idea. Your brain forgot how to use your goddamn leg, and it's annoying. There is also games to help medical personal to learn things. Driving trainers. Stuff like that. They're not really "Games" in the term of a AAA product, but they, to some degree, do what Games do. It's like Documentations on the TV, compared to that regular action-show.
But, you get something out of it. It does depend on what you play, but it teaches you to solve problems easier, to manage multiple tasks, it increases your reaction time and makes your mind a little bit better overall. At least nobody tried to teach us that killing people is bad, by shooting our closest friends in the face, right?
There is always entertainment and there is learning. Be it games, books or film. There is a difference between Quality here. One is of high quality, because it entertained you, you had fun with it. The other one is of high quality, because it taught you a new skill, was easy to understand and still added a high amount of important knowledge to your brain.
And there is no "splendor of creation". It managed to create humans, that says a lot about the stupidity of it.
@TheZizz: Go
School is for learning; games are for playing. In the most general sense though, I do agree with TheZizz. Everything critical is a problem (MW2 = kill + don't die) in a way. There are exceptions (RPG) of course. In other words, if there is nothing to aspire towards then there is nothing worth playing.
Well, I consider entertainment, play and recreation to be equivalent and steeped in the same desire for knowledge. Is the desire for stimuli and the desire to absorb information not one and the same? Even the most lazy and insipid man is not content to stare into nothingness for any period of time; on the contrary, he will be all the more voracious for his intellectual starvation, as his increasingly frantic search manifests itself in the form of TV/game addiction.
My posit is simply this: Learning is not necessarily fun, but fun is necessarily learning.
Or to put it another way, you can't have fun without learning something. The thing learned can be useless and even false; it makes no difference.
As an aside, I must vehemently advise against the self-hatred of the human race.
Sorry, wall of text! :D
Game Design is not something anyone can do... As you all can guess, it's a job as a whole. So there are a few things that you can't learn just by being a "player with keen eyes". A game designer is not an artist, he's more of a project leader because he needs to create everything from A to Z and make sure it is good to play. He also ensures his idea is done, and can be done, by the team (actually he watches over every single aspect of the production). As a game designer you have to know:
-who's your target: If your game has teddy bears in it, even with machine guns, don't try to sell it to people over 30-40 years old. A misleading on this could ruin your project pretty fast because the ones you made the game for won't like it. I have a good example about this: Totally Spies 3 DS. I worked on that game, it was supposed to be a game for 5-10 year old girls, but truth is even hardcore gamers were unable to finish it because it was too hard and the combat mode was too hard to understand and play... Epic fail. You will have to think your GDD the best way depending on your target... Actually, using already existing games as a reference can help you a lot. But don't overdo it, your game must not be a clone of another game.
-what's the genre: RTS, RPG, TPS, race, platform, adventure, crossover, serious game,... all these genre follow different rules, which is precisely why we differentiate them. There are a few steps for each of these which are mandatory, playing with genres is rare and dangerous... It can either be a huge success or a total mess, so be careful about which genre your game is. If the game uses a licence from a movie, game, or book, the choice of a genre is an even more important step. Most of the noobish GDs often forget this step and end up with a project which takes a few part of this genre here, and a few parts of that genre there... The result is a huge shit, while their goal was to make "the most awesome game ever, featuring zombies in space jumping on mushrooms to gain experience for using powerful guns which will help them attack the city to steal new levitation modules for their racing spaceships". Each of these game types have RULES. Don't even think of creating your own, it's been forever that way and there is a reason: it WORKS that way. A good game is fun because it uses/play with the rules of its genre cleverly. From a good use of these rules comes the fun factor of your game.
-how to write a GDD: The Game Design is the bible of your game. Everyone in the team needs this document, because it contains EVERY single aspect of your game (controls schemes, cameras behaviors, characters and their behaviors, list of animations, plans of levels, SFXs-VFXs list, musics, texts, cinematics, interfaces, AI, storyline...). You don't need to be a pro in each of these fields, but at least you need to know what can be done and what cannot. The list I just gave doesn't even show you a third of what it needs to contain. A GDD will even specify how sounds behave (can they be they cut, looped, when do they launch and why?), you have to ask yourself a lot of questions about how everything works together.
You can't think of all aspects if you're just a player, a huge majority of them don't even know how complex a game is, they never thought pressing a key does not only move a character but also changes its animation, locks the use of another key, launches a sound, moves a camera,... and so on... GDDs are often 200-300 pages long, with pictures, boards, lists, and everything you can think of to make it easy to understand and read. For example, the GDD for Age of Mythology was more than 500 pages long (I still have nightmares about it!). The best way to understand what is inside a GDD is to actually download the GDD of a best-seller. Any triple A game will do.
-how to write a "look and feel" document: the Look and Feel is some sort of GDD about how your game actually looks. How the interfaces are designed, where do you put 3D and where there is only 2D, how big are the buttons, and fonts, which size are the characters on screen, how the terrains look, what are the textures size for terrain and for models, how many polygons per model, which format for sounds and music,... This is the graphical part, the hard part is that you have to create screenshots of your own non-existing game... :D This is the part where you describe what the player will see, how he must feel about your game (where is it sad? where is there action? what to think of each character?)... Same advice as above, the best way to know the content of a L&F is to download one from an AAA game.
These steps are mandatory IMO, there are still a few other matters but you will cover most of the aspects of a game with these. A huge part of the GDD is about the game mechanics, so you need a good knowledge of video games but also the curiosity to check how things work. You need to have a feeling for details too.
In the end, when you are used to design games you will see how mechanics are done while you play, while other players don't. How many players actually realized there is acceleration and deceleration on EACH units in SC2? I'm pretty sure that, except mappers, only a few of them noticed. This is the kind of things you must be aware of as a game designer. Don't forget brainstormings too, which are a good way to see where your idea works and where it doesn't, and also to help you improve your game. Do not brainstorm too much though, or you will never do anything.
Guess what, business (project leader) is an art too! Something tells me your definition of art is too narrow. Even you admit it is something not everyone can do. There is a certain knack needed that no amount of practice can achieve. This is not so much the case with science.
Here's an example of a Game Design Doc: Link Removed: http://www.mediafire.com/?2k9yxthf7k78oj3
It's from the game Uplink. Some might know it - it's a fun game where you take the role of a hacker and hack yourself through da interweb.
It's the first game from Introvision Software, so it's not a 500-pages heavy mountain to read through, but it conveys the right idea and way to do it.
@Karawasa: Go
True enough... I tend to consider something is a piece of art only when I can see the result. Paintings, dancing, playing music is obviously art, but I often forget that you can consider "art" everything that needed both hard work and a "certain knack" (to quote your own words). :)
I just noticed I forgot to talk about milestones. You also do lots of these when you design a game, I think there are at least 3 milestones to do. You basically need them to summarize in a few pages how is your project evolving. The more milestones you write, the sooner you will know when something is wrong in your GDD. If something seems impossible to do (ie. there was not much progress done since the previous milestone) it might mean you have to change a few things. That's important to always improve your GDD, everyone makes mistakes/bad choices, and it's not rare to forget something when you write hundreds of pages...
Personally, I think game designing definition is pretty simple: make something fun. Of course, making something fun isn't that simple.
Later, depending on the nature of the game, you could need to design patrons and levels to advance the game, and the focus here may go to adapting the changing art to the gameplay, because when making new content you should make new art, and keep the fun changing the environment and the possibilities, or you're just repeating yourself.
Personally, I think I'm a decent game designer, but I have so many ideas and so much stuff in my head I never get to depict anything clearly. I think my ideas would be awesome and whatnot, but they're always too ambitious. Maybe I'm just a good "gameplay designer", I don't know. I have a lot of problems with symmetry, for example, cause my perfectionism makes me do everything very artificial :S.
As for game design being art, of course it is, it's like if you were an engineer, only that you work with ideas instead of physics.
My main idea about game design is is this: take a game or a series of games you love, and analyze them. You love them because they're awesome, nope? but they're not perfect, because they never are. Search those "flaws" and remake the game/s into a single game of your own, try to correct the errors of the developers. I find that a lot of games out there, games that are great, have "stupid" errors in control, cameras, etc. I don't know, but I feel I could stand up and yell "hey, that's wrong!", which makes me wonder why their boss wasn't able to in the first place. I think I'm good mostly because of that, but maybe I'm ignoring technical difficulties.. after all, saying and doing are pretty different from each other.
In the end, make something fun, that's all. If you have played a lot of games, you won't need any theory (although would be nice to give it a check to polish your project). If you're a gamer, you'll design perfectly most of the time.
Whatever, me and my deliriums.
Edit: Uh, I'm shit at balance, too. It's just hard for me >_< :P.
Game design itself can not be explained through math or science. It is turning what is in your head into a visual and playable senerio. It takes skill, knowledge, and a whole lot of math and knowing what makes games fun. Reason I say math is computers use formulas to understand what you are telling them to do. THAT part of design is pure "science". What isn't science is tweaking an idea and making it appeal to different groups of people in similar ways. The part I get stuck on is inspiration. If I can't quite see what I want, how can I make it? When I look for inspiration in the work of others, it makes my origional idea seem primitave and crude. So, I guess making a good senerio is a balance between doing what you like, appealing to mass players, and still making something that isn't terribly overused.
@ZealNaga: Go
I have to disagree on some topics :p
Mixing different Genre should be done. If done well, it does something good. Had RTS not been mended with RPG, we would never have gained some very interesting titles, WC3 among them. You should, naturally, decide what your game is at heart - RTS or RPG. Otherwise you end up with something like Spellforce. And new Genre's showed up, because some people took these steps. The self-proclaimed "MOBA"-Genre, as well as "TD" among them, though most handle them as RTS games at the moment. Will take some time, but it'll probably change soon.
"Look & Feel" Document sounds more like an Artbible combined with elements of the GDD to me. Depends on the company, I'd guess. Everyone does their job a little different.
By what I've seen & experienced up to date, there is at least 20 Milestones, if not more. Not directly related to the Publisher presentation, but to your own ends. Every other week, most of the stuff gets sorted through, at least here. Again, everyone does it their way.
@Karawasa: Go
I think your definition of "Art" is a bit to broad in this case. I've never seen "We're looking for a Game Design Artists" in my job descriptions. We're more Visionaries, similar to what Engineers do, not really "Artists" by what we do. We have a Vision. We do not build the parts of it, we do not sculpt it with our own hands (at least not all of it). So, we're Visionaries. Like the guy who wrote the Bible and got rich. And my hate against 90% of my own race is born out of facts. Maybe I've been too exposed to George Carlin when I just started to learn English :p
No, you won't. Gamers are horrible designers, until they see patterns and know what their team requires from them. Trust me, I saw people walk into the first Student project that didn't know shit about it and just played before, without any use of any editor in existence. The pain.
Well if you say that, you`ll always be @#@%^ at it.
You know, Another thing about being a game designer is you need a good amount of confidence and determination. Hesitation or doubt in yourself will just screw everything up.
I made a few maps for Warcraft 3. My first map was as good as could possibly be at the time of my skill(Kinda bad;p), But afterward I was determined to make future maps better. So, a cycle occurred, that I would better my previous maps considerably in terms of quality and design. Even to this day, I push myself to the very limit of my capability, and then some more.
And not to boast or anything, but I definitely consider myself an expert on balancing. Been doing it for ages, kept telling myself it was easy and that Im good at it, and naturally it becomes like second nature to you. So yeah, confidence is really important.
And playing is for learning.
Of course it goes without saying that perceived facts are the foundation of any philosophy or religion, no matter how tenuous. But I say to you, the only things that ever came from hate are the very things that you use to justify your hatred!
@TheZizz: Go
I agree,
playing is for learning. Even though the point is to have fun, games that don't engage your mind get old quick.
I'd actually like a big, long philosophical discussion on human nature. Some other time, when I'm awake enough. And it doesn't derail a thread. And hatred doesn't "come" from anything. Hatred just is. It's part of human nature, the faster you embrace it, the easier it becomes to life and not the fuck care about being nice and pleasing every goddamn idiot that crosses your path. But, as I said, let's discuss that some other time in another thread.
And yes, the basic idea behind playing was, to teach something to people. We still learn from games, it's just not as practical as the original intent of nature was. But it doesn't have to be teaching always. As I said, Serious Games do a good job at the whole "Play & Learn" approach. Hell, they even made a simulator for surgery practice on a digital object that gave you a frigging high-score if you did a perfect job. You just have to make those, but those only fill a small part of the market, the majority wants action & mind-numbing shooter products.
I was just asking a question, I didn't mean for this to turn into science vs Art or a long philosophical discussion on human nature. D: