PROFESSIONAL DIPLOMA IN GAME DESIGN

Students who enrol in this 10-week course in Game Design and Development will evaluate game design principles and explore their implementation in a game development environment.
While developing games for both PC and WebGL students will explore asset creation, as well as development and implementation focusing on skills and areas of interest unique to each individual learner. Students will engage in two main areas of focus during this module although other areas will be addressed and included in class for open discussion and debate. You will experiment with the Unity game engine, using custom and inbuilt components to tailor the game mechanics to your game’s needs.

Game Design:

Game Design focuses on the motivations of the player and how they interpret the game world along with the systems of the game can tell the story the designers want to tell.
Core Mechanics, Game Pillars, Risk Reward, Puzzle Design, Level Design, Character Design, Target Market, Documentation, UI Design, QA, and System Design are all explored in this area. Students are encouraged to focus on the elements that interest them the most.

Game Development:

A games’ development starts with game design and over time transitions across multiple disciplines. During this course we explore the development pipeline starting with design all the way through to QA and back again. Game design works best implementing an agile development methodology and this is encouraged and promoted in class and in assignments.
Programming, Asset development, Iterative design, Unity Game Engine, Scripting behaviours and Interactive scripting are all covered in game development.

Experience:

This course in game design and development focuses on a lot of the core elements of game design, evaluating their use in a game development environment along with how to implement them. This course is best suited to a student looking to take their first steps into the world of Game Design. While a lot of topics are covered during this course, self-directed learning is encouraged, and multiple avenues of content are offered to expand further on topics covered in the class itself.

On Demand Course:

The On-Demand delivery option of this course contains pre-recorded content created from past classes. This content shows some elements of debugging issues, discussions relating to the topics covered with students and past students work in development. This allows students who enrol in the On-Demand course to explore past students work and see how they might address an issue differently than if they would simply trouble shoot the issue on their own. As designers and developers, we learn a lot from other people and how they might fix an issue in a different way to ourselves.

Why Game Development?

• Average Game Developer’s salary in Ireland is €40k+
  • Depending on company and discipline some of the highest salaries are over €100k.
• Game developers are in high demand Worldwide
  • Game design has seen a huge growth in recent years with new laws and legislation in multiple counties encouraging more game development growth.
• Get to work across multiple areas: Art, Programming, Design, Marketing and Project Development

This course is spread across 10 lectures, within each session a new theory/topic is examined and discussed and then explored in a development environment such as Unity

Week 1

• Game Mechanics
• Visual Scripting Basics

Week 2

• Game Design Documents
• Information Types in Games

Week 3

• Introducing Mechanics to a Player
• Risk Reward

Week 4

• In Game Feedback

Week 5

• Puzzle Design
• Level Design

Week 6

• Character Design
• Animation

Week 7

• Copywrite and CC0
• UI design

Week 8

• Gathering Player Feedback

Week 9

• Character, Controller & Camera

Week 10

• Juice it or lose it
• Content recap

Content recap

Topics Expanded:

Game Mechanics:

Game mechanics are often used as a catch all term, these usually will have a word before or after giving more context and this can be seen where designers might say for example ‘Jumping’ mechanics. Mechanics are basically any system found within a game, but these mechanics have different levels of importance to the game play loop, the most important of these is the ‘core’ mechanic…

Visual Scripting:

Programming can be a barrier for some people who want to explore the world of game design. We use Visual scripting a tool built into unity that requires no programming knowledge to create custom and unique behaviours for our games.

Programming Basics:

Programming can be broken down to moving and changing data. This data can come from any where. For us as developers our main source of data is ether the player or the designers, we can store primitive data as Integers, floats, strings, and Booleans in variables…

Game Design Document:

A Game Design Document (GDD) is a document that can range in size and style depending on the game being created. A GDD for a role-playing game (RPG) may need many pages on magic, items, player stats, enemies etc. whereas a simple platformer may only require a few pages to cover all these topics. Generally, in a GDD there are some elements that you should have at all times to allow other designers and developers to ask informed questions about the game being created these areas/topics.

It is essential that for the duration of this course, you have access to either a laptop or desktop PC to gain the maximum benefit of the course and to complete the design projects to their best potential.

To participate in this course you will need access to:
Unity Hub / Unity (https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download)
Google Drive / One Drive
All software used in this course is free and easily found online.

A ‘Pass’ grade on both the digital assignment(s) (Project(s)), as well as in-class participation, is required to achieve the Professional Diploma. A ‘Fail’ grade will result in a Certificate of Attendance for the course but without the Professional Diploma being awarded. Students must attend at least 8 of the 10-course evenings to graduate with either the Professional Diploma or Certificate of Attendance unless a serious and verifiable reason for further absence is provided. Likewise, the Project must be uploaded on the due date unless a sound reason for lateness is provided. In such instances, an extension may be awarded at the discretion of the lecturer.

Digital Assessment:

Students will be assessed through two design projects.

The first project will be completed during the duration of the course.

The second project will be completed within one month of cessation of lectures.

These assignments will be based around and thus confirming the students’ learned knowledge of game design and development.

Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course learners will be able to demonstrate an understanding on the topics outlined in the course modules along with the following:

• One complete example game
• One complete personal (Custom) game
• Basic understanding of programming principles ( through visual scripting methods)
• Understand and document game mechanics in a meaningful way

All learners will be provided with links to online works and industry talks where learners can continue their exploration of game design and development.

On completion of the course students will have the skills and knowledge to design and create games. The understanding and resources provided to students will enable students to continue to develop their skills after the course.

Example past student games completed during the course:

https://city-colleges.itch.io/