Game Design

Interactive entertainment makes more revenue than the music and movie industries combined. With many people building lifelong careers in games, game design is a critical skill set to every development team. In this course, we will understand approaches and fundamental design philosophies and skills that game designers use while developing games. Students will learn to understand games like a designer. They will utilize industry terms to increase their communication abilities for design ideas and game descriptions. They will analyze what makes a game fun by examining player behavior patterns and emotive states of the player, and how a designer’s choices impact players. Students will learn a brief history of game development to understand why certain standards and expectations exist; they will learn how a development team functions in a game studio to construct games; how to test their design ideas through prototyping and playtesting; and how to construct and utilize design documentation that is used to construct modern games. Players will examine what makes games products and how to monetize them ethically.