how is the experience of video game designing

Hi Joseph!

I think you'll find that game design is challenging, complex, difficult, rewarding, fascinating, addicting and fun!

There are a lot of different "flavors" of game design - from narrative & audio/visual to technical & systems design. Some designers "storyboard" all of their work and tend to solve problems visually, others work exclusively in spreadsheets and numbers, others prefer writing their designs in words.

The experience of a designer career also depends whether you are working for a small, independent developer or in a larger, corporate, team environment. In short, are you going to be implementing your own ideas, or is someone else going to be doing all of that work?

One of the biggest (and more challenging) parts of the job is being able to communicate your designs clearly to the other people who will be implementing them. They will need to bulletproof the ideas and understand them (even better than you) before they can be developed in a practical way. They will need to point out all of the flaws with your design, and will ask difficult questions before they can feel good about the work they are about to develop. Sometimes your designs cannot be implemented due to technical constraints, scheduling concerns or someone may just disagree with your approach and offer an alternate suggestion that requires you to completely rethink your design and how the pieces fit together. How you respond to these challenges is key.

A designer just getting started in their career may initially find it intimidating to work with engineers and artists, it takes a special vulnerability to do the job - but over time most develop resilience and confidence, and find the collaborative process refreshing because it will ultimately make the game better for everyone.

Hope it helps!

Designing video games is a lot of fun, Joseph. What I like most about designing video games, is that at any point I feel lost in direction or I find a hesitation between multiple decisions, I ask myself one question - "What will delight the players of this game, most?" This question almost always clears my creative block.

Doing the job can at times get complicated as you almost always engage in the business of making video games. At times you're under the dilemma of serving a business objective and you want to make sure that players enjoy the work and pay you for it. Decisions made, sometimes work out and on other times, they don't.

However, when you read good player reviews and an increase in popularity of the game, all the hard work feels well justified! :)

Hi Joseph,
Game design is similar to any software development process. Games design involves art, programming, story telling, and complex algorithms. There are many books that can show you how to get started. You could create a game for a website, iPad, iPhone, etc. Find out what part of game development you like and focus on that. Good Luck!