What is the Game Design Process?
The game design process follows a structured approach to create an enjoyable experience. It involves various stages such as surprising ideas, establishing the fundamental mechanics, storyline, and visual style, developing assets, testing and refining the game, and releasing it with continuous support. Throughout each stage, designers, artists, programmers, and other professionals collaborate to ensure the game is innovative and enjoyable. They constantly consider the target audience, platform constraints, and the overall vision of the game. Effective processes in game design prioritize enhancements and adaptations based on player feedback and evolving requirements.
Importance of Game Design Process
Every important aspect of game production, from making an idea to executing the idea, is influenced by the game design.
1. Forming a Strategy for Appropriate Game Design
Game developers have a responsibility to make a plan into reality, but they are unable to make a game successful due to many reasons. A game’s success is mostly determined by its mechanics and user engagement, not by its higher-level promotional plan. A skilled game designer develops an idea that is compatible with the circumstances of the market.
2. A Well-designed Game helps you to Execute
Only the best identity and good mechanisms that complement one another will make a fantastic game; your game should have a unique character. Excellent game design will make it possible for you to do that.
Overview of Game Design Stages
There is much more to do in the design process than just designing a game. Various crucial stages are involved, from figuring out what people want to experience to analyzing the performances of the competitors.
There are three main stages in game design metrics: Pre Production, Production, and Post Production.
Pre Production
1. Focusing on Requirements
The first step in game design process is making it a permanent source of revenue generation according to game developers’ requirements. They must investigate industry demands, choose an appropriate game genre, and identify the target audience to ensure they make the proper investment.
2. Research
To fulfill any kind of requirement, there is a need for deep research and finding the demand for the final product in the market. Research is one of the most important game design stages.
3. Specify the Objectives
After doing the two first steps in the game design process successfully, there is an obvious need to find and analyze the objectives of the process of game design. In the game design process, every detail, including a character’s name and description, must be considered. Developers will subsequently be able to code these components into visually appealing designs.
4. Concept Art
The beginning of representation in imagery is called concept art, an important pre-production process of game design. These are concept artists’ drawings of every aspect of the game, which will either change or not change as it is developed. It provides a visual representation of the character’s appearance as well as the setting in which they will exist for designers and developers.
5. Map Development
Map development is basically an outline to make a structure of the whole process of game design. After planning and researching, game designers must draw the layout to execute the concept successfully.
6. Sketch Level Design
This game-designing process helps you develop at this point of the process will have a direct impact on the final result, which makes it quite important. These designs will serve as a point of reference for the developers and designers to figure out how the characters interact with one another and the environment around them.
7. Prototyping
Through prototyping, a game’s idea, performance, and design are tested to see if they work and if continued development is profitable. Usually, no more features or components are introduced to a game soon after it has been prototyped.
Production
1. Scaling & Proportion
When players interact directly with a puzzle or logic game, the perspective is the same. However, in certain genres, like open-world games, the viewpoint of the character may shift in response to environmental changes. Any gaming character should scale as they travel about the game elements, either toward or away from them. Throughout the game, make sure that every element scales appropriately.
2. Blockouts
Blockouts, the step after the effective first step in the game design process include the non-playable people, buildings, and many more items, are arranged effectively using this game design process. You may detail each feature of the game with a feeling of its surroundings by dividing the levels into blocks.
3. Textures
In the production stage of game design metrics, static models for each piece are built before adding textures, not the other way around. This is because, in comparison to other updations, texture modification is comparatively simpler. Keep in mind that the kind of textures used in a game affects how realistic it seems and feels.
4. Lighting
Without appropriate light, anything is non-existent. Lighting is a very important step like textures. Proper lighting helps to make the game including the characters, the movement of characters, and the other items more visual.
5. Adding More Features
Again, this could not apply to logic or puzzle games. Characters will interact with many objects in an open-world game, including cars, doors, and many more objects. How realistic they feel depends largely on how each of these components interacts with the character and the setting.
6. Cinematic Scenes
When game developers are designing a game, there must be some cinematic vibe. Cinematic scenes include a hero, and a villain, and the fight or difference between the two is one of the main elements of the game design process. It easily attracts the gamers’ attention.
7. Other Features
Other features like sound effects, visual effects, and language settings are very crucial in a design process.
Post Production
1. QA Testing
Even after games are released, games frequently include problems and glitches. An actual user’s eye could be needed to identify the game design flaws that you had not considered. QA testing is the first step in the game design process of the post-production stage. To ensure that players have the greatest experience possible, the game world and characters must be examined and refined from every viewpoint, including scale and lighting concerns.
2. Redesign
After releasing a game, to fix any bugs or glitches, the game needs to be redesigned for more appeal.
3. Monitoring the Performance of Application
Only releasing and redesigning a game is not the end of the duty of a whole design process. Designers have to keep an eye to monitor the performance of the application. This game design stage helps in improving a game.
Read More: Top 9 Useful Game Development Tools in 2023
Conclusion
Throughout the whole game design process, from planning to execution, there are so many essential steps. The process of game design will be more organized and updated with more time and effort you put into it. If you want to execute the planning of game design from your head to the device, you can contact the experts of game development at WorkLooper Consultants Pvt. Ltd., the best game development company in India.