FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN

22MCA423
IV SEMESTER
DEPARTMENT OF MCA
MODULE-1 NOTES

MODULE-1
Games and Video Games. Conventional Games Versus Video Games. Games for
Entertainment. Serious Games. Designing and Developing Games: An Approach to the Task.
Key Components of Video Games. The Structure of a Video Game. Stages of the Design
Process. Game Design Team Roles. Game Design Documents, The Anatomy of a Game
Designer
1. GAME
A game is a type of play activity, conducted in the context of a pretended reality, in which the
participant(s) try to achieve atleast one arbitrary, nontrivial goal by acting in accordance with
rules.

Art, Engineering, or Craft? Game design can be thought as an art, a process of imagination
that draws on a mysterious well spring of creativity. Some may assume game designers as
artists, and they suppose that game designers spend their time indulging in flights of
imagination. Mathematical practitioners think Game design can also be seen as a type of
engineering. They concentrate on the methodology for determining and balancing the rules of
play.
A game includes both artistic and functional elements: It must be aesthetically pleasing, but
it also must work well and be enjoyable to play. The greatest games—the ones whose
reputations spread like wild fire and that continue to be played and discussed long after their
contemporaries are forgotten. We can combine their artistic and functional elements
brilliantly, achieving a quality for which the best word is elegance. Elegance is the sign of
craftsmanship of the highest order.

The Player-Centric Approach:

PLAYER-CENTRIC GAME DESIGN is a philosophy of design in which the designer

envisions representative player of a game the designer wants to create.

■The duty to entertain: A game’s primary function is to entertain the player, and it is the
designer’s obligation to create a game that does so. Other motivations are secondary.

■ The duty to empathize: To design a game that entertains the player, the designer must
imagine that he is the player and must build the game to meet the player’s desires and
preferences for entertainment.
MISCONCEPTION1: I AM MY OWN TYPICAL PLAYER. For years, designers built
video games, in effect, for themselves. They assumed that whatever they liked, their customers
would also like. Because most designers were young males, they took it for granted that their
customer base was also made up of young males. That was indeed true for a long time, but
now it is a dangerous fallacy. As the market for games expands beyond the traditional gamer,
we must be able to design games for other kinds of players. In the player-centric approach,
this means learning to think like your intended players, whoever they may be: little girls, old
men, busy mothers, and so on. We cannot assume that players like what you like. Rather, we
must learn to design for what they like.
 MISCONCEPTION 2: THE PLAYER IS MY OPPONENT. Because arcade (coin-op)
games have been around a long time, some of the techniques of arcade game design have
crept into other genres where they are not appropriate. Arcade games make money by
getting the player to put in more coins. Consequently, they are designed to be hard to play
for more than a few minutes and to continually threaten the player with losing the game.
This places considerable constraints on the designer’s freedom to tell a story or to
modulate the difficulty of the game play. The famous Japanese designer Shigeru
Miyamoto, who invented the arcade game Donkey Kong (and with it the entire Mario
franchise), eventually abandoned arcade game design because he found it too limiting the
arcade model encourages the game designer to think of the player as an opponent. It
suggests that the designer’s job is to create obstacles for the player, to make it hard for the
player to win the game. This is a profoundly wrongheaded approach to game design. It
does not take into account the player’s interests or motivations for playing. It ends to
equate “hard” with “fun.” And it ignores the potential of creative games, which may not
include obstacles at all. Game design is about much more than creating challenges
integrating for Entertainment A good designer seeks not to maximize one characteristic at
the expense of others but to integrate them all in support of a higher goal, entertaining the
player.
 A game must present an imaginative, coherent experience, so the designer must have
a vision.
 A game must sell well, so the designer must consider the audience’s preferences.
 A game with a license must pay back the license’s cost, so the designer must understand
what benefits this license brings and exploit them to the game’s best advantage .
 A game must offer an intelligent challenge and a smooth, seamless experience, so the
designer must understand the technology.
 A game must be attractive, so the designer must think about its aesthetic style.

Player- centric game design means testing every element and every feature against the
standard: Does this contribute to the player’s enjoyment? Does it entertain her? If so, it
stays; if not, you should consider eliminating it.

2. Conventional games vs Video games.

Conventional games must have a thorough understanding of the essential elements play,
rules, goals, and so on and should be able to design an enjoyable game with nothing but
paper and pencil. Video games are a subset of the universe of all games. A video game is a
game mediated by a computer, whether the computer is installed in a tiny keychain device
such as a Tamagotchi or in a huge electronic play environment at a theme park
Hiding the Rules
Unlike conventional games, video games ordinarily do not require written rules. The game
still has rules, but the machine implements and enforces them for the players.
 Setting the Pace In conventional games that don’t use a timer, either the players or an
independent referee sets the pace of the game—the rate at which the events required by the
rules take place. In effect, it is up to the players to make the game go. In video games, the
computer sets the pace and makes the game go. Unless specifically waiting for the player’s

input, the computer keeps the game moving forward at whatever pace the designer has set.
Presenting a Game World
The players can think of themselves as make-believe characters in a make-believe place.
With conventional games, this takes place primarily in the player’s imagination, although
printed boards, cards, and so on can help.
Video games can go much further. By using a screen and speakers, video games present a
fictional world the players can sense directly. Modern video games are full of pictures,
animation, movies, music, dialog, sound effects, and so on that conventional games cannot
possibly provide
Creating Artificial Intelligence AI brings considerably more to video gaming than
artificial opponents for traditional games. Game developers use AI techniques for the
following: strategy, path finding , natural language parsing, natural language generation.

3. Games for Entertainment:

The vast majority of video games in the world are designed to entertain people, either for
profit or for free. To make games for entertainment, we must learn to be an entertainer.
Gameplay: Games provide game play, that is, challenges and actions that entertain. People
enjoy a challenge, as long as they can reasonably expect to accomplish it. People also try a
challenge they do not expect to meet if the risk is low and the reward is high. Challenges
create tension and drama. At the simplest level, presenting players with a challenge amounts
to asking the question, “Can you do it?” They’ll enjoy trying to prove that they can. People
also enjoy executing the actions that the game offers. It’s fun to fly a plane, shoot a rifle,
design clothing, build a castle, or sing and dance. Video games let us do many things that
are impossible or too expensive for us to do in real life, which is an important part of their
appeal.
Aesthetics Video Games are an art form, so aesthetics area part of their design. This doesn’t
means a game has to be beautiful any more than a film or a painting has to be beautiful.
Rather, it must be designed with a sense of style and created with artistic skill. A game with
clumsy animation, a muddy sound track, trite dialog, or sloppy artwork will distract or
disappoint players even if its game play is good. Aesthetic considerations go beyond the
game world, though. The interface graphics — buttons, numbers, type fonts, and so on—
must complement the game world to create a consistent experience. Even the way the game
responds to the player’s button presses can be judged aesthetically.
Harmony Good games and game worlds possess harmony, which is the feeling that all
parts of the game belong to a single, coherent whole. This quality was first identified by
game designer
Harmony is an essential quality of a game’s aesthetic appeal. With every design decision we
make, we should ask our self whether the result is in harmony with your overall vision. Too
many games have elements that seem as if they are bolted on, last-minute ideas that
somebody thought would be cool to include.
Immersion
The feeling of immersion is deeply and satisfyingly entertaining to some players; others
prefer not to become immersed and to remember that it’s only a game while they play.
People who take the game seriously find interruptions that break their sense of immersion
jarring and disappointing.

Players become immersed in games in several ways:

Tactical immersion is the sense of being “in the groove” in high-speed action games. It’s
sometimes called the Tetris trance. When playing such a game, the action is so fast that your
brain has no time for anything else. You don’t have time to think about strategy or a story
line; the game is mostly about survival. To encourage tactical immersion, you must offer the
player dozens of small challenges that can each be met in a fraction of a second.
Strategic immersion occurs when you are deeply involved in trying to win a game ,like the
immersion of the chess master: observing, calculating, and planning. You don’t think about
a story, characters, or the game world but focus strictly on optimizing your choices. To
experience strategic immersion, the players must understand the rules of the game clearly so
that they can plan actions to their maximum advantage. Strategic immersion breaks down if
a game confronts players with a situation they have never seen before or if the game
contains too many unpredictable elements. Unexpected or erratic behavior makes it
impossible to plan.
Spatial immersion is the sense of being in a place other than the one you’re actually in.
This is what virtual reality equipment is designed to achieve, although it’s not necessary;
with a good 3D engine, people can feel spatially immersed in an environment even without
stereo vision or 360-degree sound. Some players set up multiple monitors so even their
peripheral vision is seeing the gameworld, which heightens their sense of spatial immersion.
Narrative immersion is the feeling of being inside a story; the player is completely
involved and accepts the world and events of the story as real. It is the same immersion as
that produced by a good book or movie, but in video games, the player is also an actor
within the story.
Emotional Resonance:
These were the top10 emotions that people both experience and enjoy:
 Amusement. Surprisingly, this was by far the most prevalent emotional experience in
games and the second most desired one after wonderment Bateman suggested that perhaps
this indicates that we should be working harder to make games funny.
Contentment. Contentment is that sense of satisfaction you get when you solve a puzzle,
collect a full set of something, or complete a series of tasks.
Wonderment..Players love to be amazed.
Excitement. Almost all players sometimes feel excitement when playing, although not all
of them make active efforts to find it.
Curiosity. Players want to know what’s around the corner, behind the mountain, or in the
locked chest. They also want to know what’s going to happen next. Engaging players’
curiosity is an important skill in level design.
Surprise. Surprises can be pleasurable or they can be startling or even frightening, but
however they appear, players like them.
Naches. It refers to the pleasure of seeing one’s students or children do well. People feel
this when they help a friend or a child learn a game. The players who hang around the
entrance portals of massively multi player online games (MMOGs) giving a device, comers
are seeking naches.
Relief. People sometimes creates a sense of relief more than a sense of triumph.
Bliss. Utter joyfulness without stress. This is not that common in games but may become
more so in the future. New kinds of games might emphasize relaxed game-play rather than
the more demanding forms that dominate commercial games at the moment.
4. Serious games:

Serious games are games that solve real-world problems. They are not designed purely for
entertainment but to accomplish something meaningful in the real world. The best of them
are entertaining , however, because they achieve their goals by means of enjoyable play.
There are many kinds of serious games, and are briefed as follows.
Education and Training:
The oldest form of serious game is the educational game. Educational gaming has advanced
considerably since its beginnings, as designers have found ways to inspire players to learn,
or to teach them things without their even being aware that they are being taught—a trick
called stealth learning. Educational games are not confined to children. Many vocations
require training and use games as a teaching tool. For example, games can be used to train
para-medics, hazardous materials response teams, and military personnel. I have consulted
on the design of a game that trains laparoscopic surgeons to improve their motor skills
Simulation and Study Many games(such as flight and driving simulators) reproduce are a
process of some kind, so the boundary between games and simulations is indistinct.
Generally speaking, a pure simulation makes no concessions to entertainment at all and tries
to be as accurate as possible within the limitations of its hardware. Serious games for the
purpose of simulation try to retain the accuracy but to incorporate more game-like qualities
 to provide player feedback and engagement. For example, the online puzzle game Fold it
lets players search for proteins with shapes that can be useful in chemistry and medicine.
Persuasive Games: Some people use games to convey a particular message or point of
view, either to advertise a product or to promote a political or charitable cause. The web-
based Virtual Pilot game by Lufthansa airline tests the players’ knowledge of the names and
locations of European cities... but it includes only the cities that Lufthansa flies to, so it
subtly promotes awareness of their route map. If a game conveys its message primarily
through its mechanics rather than through explicit narration, we say that is uses procedural
rhetoric.
Games for Health and Growth It’s now well known that mental exercise helps to prevent
loss of brain function as humans age, and this accounts for the popularity of brain-training
games. But games can be used in many other aspects of health care and personal growth as
well. Wi Fi has become popular in care homes for the elderly and as a way of making
physical therapy less boring. Games can also reduce the need for morphine during painful
procedures by distracting the patient. The University of Washington’s Medical Center
created a game called Snow World, which—with the addition of virtual reality gear—helps
people undergoing burn treatment.

5. The key components of Video games.

Core Mechanics:
• One of a game designer’s tasks is to turn the general rules of the game into a symbolic
and mathematical model that can be implemented algorithmically.
• This model is called the core mechanics of the game. The model is more specific than the
rules.
• The core mechanics are at the heart of any game because they generate the game-play.
• They define the challenges that the game can offer and the actions that the player can take
to meet those challenges.
• The core mechanics also determine the effect of the player’s actions upon the game
world.
• The mechanics state the conditions for achieving the goals of the game and what
consequences follow from succeeding or failing to achieve them.
• One quality of the core mechanics is their degree of realism
• We will decide what degree of realism that our game will have when we decide upon its
concept.
• The decision we make determines how complex the core mechanics are.
For example, a real army requires a large general staff to make sure the army has all the
ammunition and supplies it needs. In a game, a single player has to manage everything, so to
avoid overwhelming him, the designer abstracts these logistical considerations out of the
model
User Interface:
• UI is designed to be as efficient as possible and to present the user’s work clearly.
• The user interface mediates between the core mechanics of the game and the player (see
Figure 2.1).
• It takes the challenges that are generated by the core mechanics (driving a racing car, for
example) and turns them into graphics on the screen and sound from the speakers.
• It also turns the player’s button presses and movements on the keyboard or controller into
actions within the context of the game.
• As the user interface lies between the player and the core mechanics, it is sometimes
referred to as the presentation layer.
• It presents the story of the game
• All the artwork and all the audio of the game are part of its user interface, also known as
its presentation layer. Two essential features of the user interface of a game are its camera
model and its interaction model

Interaction Models:
• The relationship between the player’s inputs and the resulting actions is dictated by the
game’s interaction model.
• The model determines how the player projects her will, her choices, and her commands,
into the game.
• Video games use a number of standard interaction models, including multi presence,
avatar-based models, contestant models, and so on.
• In a multi-present model, for example, the player can act on different parts of the game
world whenever she wants to, reaching “into” it from the “outside.”
• Just as the visible parts of a game’s user interface change during play, a game can have
more than one interaction model depending on what is happening at the time
Camera Models:
• If a game includes a simulated physical space, or game world, then it almost certainly
uses graphics to display that space to the player.
• The user interface must display the space from a particular angle or point of view.
• Designers usually imagine that a hypothetical camera is pointed at the virtual space,
creating the image that the player sees.
• The system that controls the behavior of this imaginary camera is called the camera
model.
 • To define the camera model, think about how you want the player to view the game
world and specify a system in your design documents that the programmers can
implement.
• Static camera models is in which the camera always shows the virtual space from a fixed
perspective
• Dynamic camera models require more effort to design and implement, but they make the
player’s experience livelier and more cinematic.
• The most commonly used camera models are first person and third person for presenting
3D game worlds and top-down, side-scrolling, and isometric for presenting 2D worlds.

6. The structure of a video game.

How and why the changes occur are determined by the game’s structure. The structure is
made up of gameplay modes and shell menus.
GamePlay Modes:
• The combination of related items available gameplay and supporting user interface at a
given point in the game—collectively describe something called a gameplay mode.
• A gameplay mode consists of the particular subset of a game’s total gameplay that is
available at any one time in the game, plus the user interface that presents that subset of
the gameplay to the player.
• The concept of the gameplay mode is central to the process of designing video games.
• A game can be in only one gameplay mode at a time.
• Many of the earliest arcade games have only one gameplay mode. In Asteroids, for
example, you fly a spaceship around a field of asteroids, trying to avoid being hit by one
and shooting at them to break them up and disintegrate them. The camera model and the
interaction model never change, nor does the function of the controls.
 Shell Menus and Screens:
• modes in which the player cannot affect the game world but can make other changes is
called shell menus.
• Non interactive sequences such as title screens or credits screens are called shell screens.
The Game Structure:
• The gameplay modes and shell menus of the game, and the relationships among them,
collectively make up the structure of the game.
• To document the structure, you can begin by making a list of all the modes and menus in
the game.
• You must also include a description of when and why the game switches from one mode
or menu to another: what event, or menu selection, causes it to change.
• Each mode or menu description should include a list of other modes and menus it can
switch to and, for each possible switch, a notation about what causes it
• A better approach is to document the structure of a game with a flowboard, a combination
of flowchart and storyboard.

7. The stages of Design process

• The concept stage, which you perform first and whose results do not change
• The elaboration stage, in which you add most of the design details and refine your
decisions through prototyping and playtesting
• The tuning stage, at which point no new features may be added, but you can make small
adjustments to polish the game.
The Concept Stage:
• It establishes things about the game that are so fundamental, changing them later would
wreak havoc on the development process because a great deal of the work done to
implement the game would have to be thrown away
Getting a concept:a general idea of how you intend to entertain someone through gameplay
and, at a deeper level, why you believe it will be a compelling experience.
f your game resembles others that are already on the market, you would normally playtest
several to see how they did things and how you can improve on them.
Defining an audience: Once you know what kind of experience you want to present, you
have to think about who would enjoy that experience.
, in player-centric design, you test every design decision against your hypothetical
representative player to be sure that the decision helps to entertain your target audience.
Determining the players role:In a representational game, the player does a lot more
pretending. Sometimes the roles in a game are multifaceted
Fulfilling the dream: Representational games are about fulfilling dreams—dreams of
achievement, of power, of creation, or simply of doing certain things and having certain
experiences.
Once you have a game concept, a role, and an audience in mind, it’s time to begin thinking
about how you will fulfill your player’s dream. What is the essence of the experience that
you are going to offer? What kinds of challenges does the player expect to face, and what
kinds of actions does she expect to perform? Deciding what it means to fulfill the dream is
the first step on the road to defining the gameplay itself.
The Elaboration Stage:
In the elaboration stage, you normally begin working with a small development team to
construct a prototype of the game. If you are planning to incorporate radically new ideas or
new technology, your team may also build a test bed or technical demonstration to try them
out.
Prototyping:
Prototyping A prototype is a simplified, but testable, version of your game. Designers make
prototypes to try out game features before they spend the time and money to implement them
in the actual game; they also use them for play-testing with their audience to see if the game
is enjoyable.
To build a software prototype, you create software that isn’t as complete as your full game in
order to try out some aspect of it. Tools such as Game Maker can make this much easier than
doing it from scratch.

• Defining the primary gameplay mode:

The first task after deciding your concept is to define the primary gameplay mode of the
game, the mode in which the player spends the majority of his time. Most games have one
gameplay mode that is clearly the primary one. In a car racing game, it’s driving the car.
 Tuning up the car in the shop is a secondary mode. In war games, the primary gameplay
mode is usually tactical—fighting battles. War games often have a strategic mode as well, in
which the player plans battles or chooses areas to conquer on a map, but he generally spends
much less time doing that than he does fighting.
• Designing the protagonist: If your game is to have a single main character who is the
protagonist (whether or not the interaction model is avatar-based), it is essential that you
design this character early on. You want the player to like and to identify with the
protagonist, to care about what happens to her.
• Defining the game world: The game world is where your game takes place, and defining
it can be an enormous task. There are many dimensions to a game world: physical,
temporal, environmental, emotional, and ethical. All these qualities exist to serve and
support the gameplay of your game, but they also entertain in their own right.
• Designing the core mechanics: If we have a sense of the kinds of challenges and actions
that need to be included in the primary gameplay mode, you can begin thinking about
how the core mechanics create those challenges and implement the actions.
• Creating additional modes: As we decide upon our game concept, you may realize that
you need more than one gameplay mode. in the elaboration stage, design the additional
modes: their perspective, interaction model, and gameplay. You must also document
what causes your game to move from mode to mode—the structure of your game
• Designing levels: Level design is the process of constructing the experience that the
game offers directly to the player, using the components provided by the game design:
the characters, challenges, actions, game world, core mechanics, and storyline if there is
one. Creating a working playable level is an important milestone in the development of a
game because it means that testers can begin play-testing it
• Writing the story: A story may be integrated with the gameplay in a number of different
ways. The story may be embedded, with prewritten narrative chunks, or emergent, arising
out of the core mechanics. It may be linear and independent of the player’s actions, or it
may go in different directions based on the player’s choices.
• Build, test and iterate Video games must be prototyped before they can be built for real,
and they must be tested at every step along the way. Each new idea must be constructed
and tried out, preferably in a quick-and-dirty fashion first, before it is incorporated into
the completed product.
The Tuning Stage:
• Feature lock-No more features can be added.
• The features are defined and executed in elaboration stage. In tuning stage we can add
some changes to the features.

8. The game design team roles.

Lead Designer. This person oversees the overall design of the game and is responsible for
making sure that it is complete and coherent. She is the “keeper of the vision” at the highest
and most abstract level. She also evangelizes the game to others both inside and outside the
company and is often called upon to serve as a spokesperson for the project. A project has
only one lead designer.
General Game Designer. A game designer who doesn’t have a specialized role like the ones
that follow is usually responsible for a little bit of everything, but in particular defining the
gameplay—the challenges the player will face and the actions that he can take to overcome
those challenges. This may include thinking up and describing a great many game elements:
enemies, friendly non-player characters, types of units, and so on
Level Designers: Level designers take the essential components of the game provided by the
other designers—the user interface, core mechanics, and gameplay—and use those
components to design and construct the individual levels that the player will play through in
the course of a game. On large games, level designers frequently need to build 3D models
and program in scripting languages.

User Interface Designer: If a project includes user interface design as a separate role, it’s
performed by one or more people responsible for designing the layout of the screen in the
various gameplay modes of the game and for defining the function of the input devices.

Writer. Writers are responsible for creating the instructional or fictional content of the game:
introductory material, back story, dialogue, cut-scenes (non-interactive narrative video clips),
and so on.
Art Director. The art director, who may also be called the lead artist, manages production of
all the visual assets in the game: models, textures, sprites, animations, user interface
elements, and so on. The art director also plays a major role in creating and enforcing the
visual style of the game. the art director is usually at the same level as the lead designer

Audio Director.
Like the art director, the audio director of a game oversees production of all the audible
assets in the game: music, ambient sounds, effects, and dialogue or narration.

Lead Programmer. The lead programmer oversees the coding team and is responsible for
the technical design of the game, as well as the quality of the software.

Producer or Project Manager Job roles in the game industry are not standardized, but
typically a producer has overall responsibility for the game as a commercial product, and in
addition to thinking about development, he also works with marketing, public relations, and
community managers (if any) to help build excitement about the game before release.
Producers usually expect to have a fair amount of creative input into the design, and they
expect veto power over expensive or unworkable suggestions. The producer may also track
 the day-to-day progress of development, making sure that tasks are getting completed and
that nobody is stuck waiting for something else to happen

9. The anatomy of a Game Designer.

Imagination
A game exists in an artificial universe, a make-believe place governed by make-believe rules.
Imagination is essential to creating this place. It comes in various forms:
Visual and auditory imagination enables you to think of new buildings, trees, animals,
creatures, clothing, and people—how they look and sound.
Dramatic imagination is required for the development of good characters, plots, scenes,
motivations, emotions, climaxes, and conclusions.
Conceptual imagination is about relationships between ideas, their interactions, and
dependencies.
Lateral thinking is the process of looking for alternative answers, taking an unexpected
route to solve a problem.
Deduction is the process of reasoning from a creative decision you’ve made to its possible
consequences. Deduction isn’t ordinarily thought of as imagination, but the conclusions you
arrive at produce new material for your game.

Technical Awareness:
Technical awareness is a general understanding of how computer programs, particularly
games, actually work.
Level designers, in particular, often need to be able to program in simple scripting languages.
You must also be aware of its limitations so that you don’t create unworkable designs.

Analytical Competence:
Analytical competence is the ability to study and dissect something: an idea, a problem, or an
entire game design. No design is perfect from the start; game design is a process of iterative
refinement. Consequently, you must be able to recognize the good and bad parts of a design
for what they are.
Mathematical Competence: Designers must have basic math skills, including trigonometry
and the simpler principles of probability. Balancing games that feature complex internal
economies, such as business simulations or real-time strategy games, can require you to
spend a lot of time looking at numbers.

Aesthetic Competence:
Although you need not be an artist, you should have a general aesthetic competence and
some sense of style. Far too many games are visual clones of one another, depending on
stereotypes and clichés rather than real imagination.
It’s up to you (along with your lead artist) to set the visual tone of the game and to create a
consistent, harmonious look
General Knowledge and the Ability to Research:
The most imaginative game designers are those who have been broadly educated and are
interested in a wide variety of things. It helps to be well versed in such topics as history,
literature, art, science, and political affairs.
Writing Skills
A professional game designer actually spends most of his time writing, so a designer must
have good writing [Link] means being clear, concise, accurate, and unambiguous.
Technical writing is the process of documenting the design in preparation for development.
Fiction writing (narrative) creates the story of the game as a whole—a critical part of the
design process if the game has a strong storyline.
Dialog writing (drama) is needed for audio voiceovers and cinematic material. Dialog
conveys character, and it also can form part of the plot.
Drawing Skills
The vast majority of computer games rely heavily on visual content, and drawings are
essential when you’re pitching a product to a third party.
The Ability to Synthesize:
Synthesis, in this context, means bringing together different ideas and constructing
something new from them.
First, you must allow your team some ownership of the vision as well, or its members won’t
have any motivation or enthusiasm for the project.
Second, a designer who can’t deliver in a team environment, no matter how visionary she
may be, doesn’t stay employed for long. You must be able to work successfully with other
people.