What is game designing?
Game designing involves planning, visualizing, and designing every element of the game. Game designers are the architects of the game, who visualize the entire concept and use their technological and narrative skills in designing the structure of the game, its various levels, puzzles, characters, storylines, animation, and art. Thus they work to give an immersive experience to the customer.
The game designers work with a team of professionals handling various functions-from budgeting, to coding to animations, music & sound engineers, etc. While designing the games, they need to ensure that the designed games must not only be easily maintained but also they must be expandable and must lend themselves easily to the ever-evolving world including augmented reality. Additionally, they must make sure that the games should be played across various formats and platforms. Furthermore, the designers are also involved with conducting a feasibility study of the game concept using market research. Besides this, a game designer must also understand his audience’s psychology to have them hooked on to his games.
Scope in Game Designing:
The current pandemic restricted movements during lockdown across the world. However, this led to a boom in the gaming industry since globally the time spent on video gaming increased by 39%. India the story was all the more exciting since pandemic-induced lockdown resulted in 50% growth in the gaming industry.
In fact, according to KPMG India, the online gaming segment is projected to grow at a CAGR of 21 percent by FY25 to reach a size of Rs 29,000 crore from an estimated value of Rs 13,600 crore in FY21. All in all, if you opt for bachelors in game design, then you are opening up doors to lots of opportunities, and that too in an industry that is on the rise and that too at a time when the economy is shrinking.
Besides this, game designing requires excellent knowledge of computer science along with graphics and animation. This broad scope of learning opens up lots of opportunities for students.
Following are the various opportunities for students opting for a bachelor in game design:
- Game Animator: He is responsible for combining technology with art and imagination to create interactive animated images. Animator, using digital or hand-drawn pictures, models, or puppets, produces multiple images called frames, which when sequenced together, create an illusion of movement. This is called animation. Animators tend to work in:
- 2D
- Stop-Motion / Stop-Frame
- 3D hand-drawn
- Computer-generated.
- Game Audio Engineer: Basis the genre and the essence of the game, the audio engineer blends audio, gives sound effects to bring the game alive.
- Game Designer: They are the center of creativity. They ideate, are involved in building levels, characters, puzzles, prototypes, create interactive narrations, and develop the mechanics of the game. They need to ensure that the systems can be easily maintained, expandable and should provide an unsurpassed user experience.
- Game Programmer: They are usually software engineers, who use the appropriate programming language, such as HTML, Flash, PHP, etc. to ensure that the game (product) runs on different platforms.
- Creative Game Director: He is usually the creator of the game concept who ensures that the video game project looks perfect and is as per the overall vision of the project.
- Game Artist: A game artist uses his imagination and visualization skills to create 2D or 3D art forms for building a visual story.
- Game Marketer/PR: They must communicate the developer’s message to the public. Involved with marketing the concept to ensure a large audience for the game.
- QA Game Tester: He ensures that after the final submission, all the bugs, mistakes in the game are identified and are fixed such that the game is working properly.
- Game System Designer: He works with different departments, programmers, and producers to develop game functions.