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What do I need to Become a Game Designer?

I’m in my senior year of high school and I’ve been thinking about the certain careers that interest me that I could possibly want to do long-term, video games has been a very big part of my life since childhood and it’s one of the many things I get my happiness from so to be able to be a part of making video games is something that interests me greatly. #video-games #game-design

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Rahila’s Answer

It's great you're thinking about your interests and how you can turn that into a career. You might want to think next about what part of video game development you'd enjoy most. That would help you decide on a college and specific degree. For example, are you artistic; would you want to be involved in the animation aspect? Do you like logic and would wnat to be involved in the design of the video games from that perspective? You might want to think about your favorite games, see who makes them (ie what company; some examples are Electronic Arts, Epic Games, etc). You could search the "Careers" part of those companies websites to see what kinds of jobs they hire for as well as what skills and qualifications they look for. Perhaps you'll notice that they most frequently require a degree in computer programming or the jobs that are most interesting to you are just looking for a Liberal Arts degree. That might help you think about your next steps. Good Luck!
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Jamie’s Answer

If you're specifically wanting to do game design, there's only one school that I can recommend, that's "The Guildhall"

https://www.smu.edu/guildhall

I'm sure there are others, but I've personally worked with designers and the folks that used to teach there and they are top notch.

I'm also in the Austin area so that's probably why. I'm sure there are some good schools in the New York area, I'm just not familiar.

One thing to note. If you become a game designer and then realize you don't really like designing games, you really have very few options to move laterally from game design.

I'm an FX artist in games, but I started out as a "generalist." (You do everything, animation, fx, modeling, texturing etc). I used to work in film/tv but because of my skillset I was able to move into games.

If I were a game designer I couldn't move into film/tv.

But if you chose to be an environment artist for games (they make models and make art for the environment that the designers block out with rough shapes) you could easily move to film, commercial work, product work (using your skills to model various products for clients), and probably a lot more I'm not listing.

If you chose to be an animator you could move into the same areas.

If you chose to be an engineer (programmer) you could literally work anywhere.

This isn't to discourage you from becoming a game designer. Like I said I work with some of the best ones and they love their job and we always need great talent to fill that pool.

Just want to give you the lay of the land so to speak :)

Good luck with whatever you choose, working in video games is awesome and I love it so if that's what you want to do, go for it!

Jamie recommends the following next steps:

https://www.smu.edu/guildhall (they teach design, art, and programming)
https://realtimevfx.com/ (great forum if you're looking at going into game FX
https://www.unrealengine.com/ (download this and have fun and you might just make something that will get you a job :) )
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