FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
The Anatomy of a Game Designer
Like all crafts, game design requires both talent and skill. Talent is innate, but skill is learned. Effective game designers require a wide base of skills. The following sections discuss some of the most useful skills for the professional game designer. Don't be discouraged if you don't possess all of them. It's a wish list—the characteristics of a hypothetical "ideal designer."
A game exists in an artificial universe, a make-believe place governed by make - believe rules. Imagination is essential to creating this place. It comes in various forms:
■ Visual and auditory imagination enables you to think of new buildings, trees, animals, creatures, clothing, and people—how they look and sound.
■ Dramatic imagination is required for the development of good characters, plots, scenes, motivations, emotions, climaxes, and conclusions.
■ Conceptual imagination is about relationships between ideas, their interactions, and dependencies.
■ Lateral thinking is the process of looking for alternative answers, taking an unexpected route to solve a problem.
■ Deduction is the process of reasoning from a creative decision you've made to its possible consequences. Deduction isn't ordinarily thought of as imagination, but the conclusions you arrive at produce new material for your game.
Technical awareness is a general understanding of how computer programs, particularly games, actually work. You don't have to be a software engineer, but it is extremely valuable to have had a little programming experience. Level designers, in particular, often need to be able to program in simple scripting languages. Get to know the technical capabilities of your target platform. You must also be aware of what your machine cannot do so that you don't create unworkable designs. For example, many low-end mobile phones don't have enough processing power to do 3D rendering.
Analytical competence is the ability to study and dissect something: an idea, a problem, or an entire game design. No design is perfect from the start; game design is a process of iterative refinement. Consequently, you must be able to recognize the good and bad parts of a design for what they are.
One example of an analytical task is detecting dominant (that is, unbeatable or nearly unbeatable) strategies at the design phase and weeding them out before they get into the code, as in the infamous Red Alert "tank rush." In Command & Conquer: Red Alert, tanks on the Soviet side are so much more effective than any other unit that an experienced player can dedicate all production to cranking out a few tanks and then immediately storm the opposition base before the enemy has a chance to get a production line set up.
