Whether making a video game for fun or selling, improving your video game designing skills is the way to go. User experience and interface design are a significant part of your game’s overall success. To help you with this, I’ve put together a list of top 10 ways that you can improve your video game designing skills.
Take a Course Online
One distinguishing video games from other forms of media is that they’re interactive experiences — they often involve user input rather than passive viewing or listening. That means there’s an opportunity for players to have an impact on what happens within the game world itself. Learning about how these interactions work will help make your designs more compelling for players.
An excellent place to start is with online courses like Udemy or Skillshare that teach primary programming languages like Javascript (used for creating websites) or HTML5 (used for creating mobile apps). These platforms have thousands of different courses on every subject imaginable and all at varying levels of difficulty.
Get a Mentor
Video game design is a challenging and rewarding career. There are many ways to learn this craft, but the most effective way is to get a mentor and work with them on a project.
A mentor can teach you how to structure your ideas into a design document, break down a big idea into smaller pieces, and create meaningful characters that resonate with players. A good mentor will help you think through all of these things and more!
They can also give feedback on your game designs as they progress through development. This is invaluable because it gives you an outside perspective on how players perceive your game.
In addition to mentorship from professionals in the video game industry, there are plenty of free (or inexpensive) resources online that can help you hone your skills as a game designer. Here are some of my favorites:
Keep Practicing
Playing games similar to the one you want to make can help you learn the ins and outs of the gameplay mechanics. This will allow you to see what works and what doesn’t in other games and apply them to your project.
Take notes on what aspects of a game are working well and those that aren’t working well. List down any ideas or thoughts that come up while playing the game. Then look at these notes after playing through the whole thing once more, and see if there’s anything else worth adding.
Observe and Play Other Successful Games
Video game design is a very competitive industry, and it’s essential to keep up with the latest trends.
The best way to do this is by observing other successful games. Find out what makes them work, what doesn’t work, and how you can improve them.
An excellent example of this is watching a Let’s Play video of your favorite game. You’ll notice that the player constantly looks around the environment and reacts to what they see. Look at what they’re doing and how it affects the overall experience.
Another great way to learn about video game design is by playing new games and trying them out for yourself. If you find something interesting, ask yourself why it works so well and try replicating it in your work.
Develop Your Artistic Skills
Artistic skills are essential for video game design. If you’re creating a role-playing game or another type of game that requires characters to be drawn, you must have some artistic ability. It doesn’t matter if you’re drawing stick figures or realistic portraits; just being able to visualize what a character looks like is extremely helpful when designing video games.
Be a Good Storyteller
A good storyteller knows how to tell a compelling tale that keeps people engaged and wanting more. A great video game designer can do this as well, but they also need to know how to incorporate gameplay into the narrative to enhance both sides of the equation.
This means knowing exactly when and how often to insert new elements into the story so that players don’t feel forced or out of place but rather like natural parts of the world being experienced by players as they go on their adventure through your creation.
Prepare to Collaborate
It might seem like making a game yourself is the best way, but it’s not always possible or practical. If you’re working with others on your team, there will be some differences in opinion about what should be included in the final product.
Also, when working with multiple people on a project, it’s essential for everyone involved in creating the game to have access to all of its resources. This is because you don’t want another person to get left out of meaningful discussions about how things should look or function within the world of the video game itself.
Develop the Right Computer Skills
Video games are played on computers, so you must have the right computer skills to do the job. These include programming and coding languages like C++ and Java and graphics design programs like Photoshop or Illustrator. You’ll also need good communication skills to work with others on projects and collaborate effectively.
Get Your Game Noticed By Others First, then Seek Help With Funding
Programming languages are essential for creating video games because they allow you to control what happens in the game world. These languages can be used by artists and designers who don’t have any coding experience. Still, they’re also helpful for people who know how to program because they make it easier for them to create software tools that will make their jobs easier.
Suppose you want to be part of the development team. In that case, you must learn one or more programming languages to communicate with programmers on your team and work together seamlessly to create the best possible game experience.
Conclusion
All the above points are essential for improving your video game design skills, but there’s no magic bullet for success. You need to work at it and set that bar high for yourself. Play games, analyze them, and then try to do it better. If you want to dive into game dev, dive in. It’s not as hard as you think it is.