How to Become a Game Designer
5 Practical Tips
As a game designer, your job is essentially to create fun. Sounds easy enough, right? Unfortunately, this doesn’t just magically make it happen. How do you make a game ‘feel’ just right to play?
Game design has also changed enormously over the years. Some of the legendary designers of the 1980s and 1990s helped invent entirely new genres, mechanics and ways to play. Today, game design has grown into a broad discipline that combines creativity with systems thinking, monetization mechanics, psychology, technology and, increasingly, commercial considerations. Depending on the game you’re working on, you might find yourself designing a core gameplay loop one day and thinking about progression, balance, economies or monetisation the next.
Games themselves have become more complex too. A seemingly simple feature can interact with dozens of existing mechanics and systems, so coming up with a great idea is only the beginning. You also need to figure out whether it works, whether players understand it, whether your team can build it and, most importantly, whether it’s actually fun and successfull.
So, how do you become a good game designer? There isn’t one prescribed route into the industry, but there are plenty of ways to start developing the right skills. Here are five things we’d recommend practicing.
1. Prototype, Play and Design Games in Any Form
The best way to learn game design is to design games. That doesn’t mean you need to spend two years building your dream RPG before you have anything worth showing. Quite the opposite: learning how to turn an idea into something testable quickly is one of the most useful skills you can develop. This can be with help of templates, prototyping, AI or even prototyping in an Excel sheet or on paper.
Not every game prototype even needs to be a video game. You can test plenty of ideas using paper, cards, spreadsheets, counters or a few dice. If you’re experimenting with an economy, for example, a spreadsheet may tell you far more than a beautiful 3D prototype ever could. If you’re testing a turn-based combat system, some paper cards and dice might be enough to discover whether the basic idea works.
For ideas that do need to be interactive, game engines and tools such as Unity, Godot and Unreal can help you create rough prototypes using placeholder assets. Don’t worry about making them beautiful or rock solid code yet. A prototype exists to answer questions, not to impress players with its menu transitions. When we first worked on the very first version of Folded Flyer back in 2012 for example, we spent quite a bit of time folding actual paper planes and drawing level layouts on paper. It sounds obvious in hindsight, but physically experimenting with the things we were trying to recreate helped us better understand it.
Most importantly, don’t design exclusively for yourself. You might love something you’ve created, but you’re also the person who created it. You know how it’s supposed to work, why every rule exists and what the player is supposed to do next. Someone experiencing it for the first time doesn’t have any of that knowledge.
Get your prototypes in front of other people and see what happens. Ask questions, gather opinions and be willing to change your design. You don’t have to follow every piece of feedback you receive, but learning how to test, evaluate and iterate on an idea is fundamental to becoming a better game designer. A useful design loop is surprisingly simple: come up with an idea, try it, change it and keep testing until it works.
2. Play, Analyse and Deconstruct Games
Playing a lot of games can certainly help you become a game designer, but simply playing them isn’t enough. The useful part begins when you start asking why something works.
Think about a game you’ve played recently that kept you coming back. What was happening underneath the experience? What was the core gameplay loop? Which decisions were you repeatedly making? What rewards were you working towards? How did the game introduce new challenges? When did it increase the difficulty, and when did it give you a moment to recover?
Start pulling games apart in your head. If you discover a mechanic you particularly enjoy, try to work out why you enjoy it. If you encounter something frustrating, do the same thing. What problem was the designer trying to solve? Would you have solved it differently?
Once you start doing this regularly, you’ll notice patterns everywhere. Games constantly build on ideas that came before them, combining familiar mechanics in different ways or adapting them for new audiences and contexts. Genres themselves evolve through this process. Battle royale games, survival games, deck-builders and extraction games all combine or reinterpret mechanics that existed elsewhere.
This doesn’t mean copying somebody else’s game. It means building your design vocabulary. The more mechanics, systems and solutions you understand, the larger the toolbox you have when you’re faced with your own design problem.
And don’t restrict yourself to games you already like. Playing outside your favourite genres can be particularly useful because it exposes you to different design conventions. If you normally play RPGs, spend some time with strategy games, puzzle games, racing games or something completely outside your comfort zone. You may find a solution to your RPG problem hiding inside a game you would never normally have played.
3. Understand the Business of Games
Game designers work at the heart of the player experience, but they’re also part of a development team making a commercial entertainment product. A brilliant design that nobody can build, nobody can understand or nobody wants to play isn’t particularly useful.
That doesn’t mean you need to become an expert programmer, artist, marketer and producer at the same time. It does help enormously to understand a little about what the people around you do. Learn enough about engineering to understand why seemingly simple features can be technically complicated. Learn enough about art production to appreciate how much work goes into a character or environment. Understand the basics of audio, analytics, production, marketing and QA.
Business models matter too. A premium PC game, a free-to-play mobile game and a live-service multiplayer title can have very different design requirements. Progression, economies, content pacing and monetisation may be closely connected to the player experience, so a professional game designer needs to understand the context in which a game is being built.
This is particularly relevant to the kind of games we work on at Rumble Spark Games. We focus mostly on free-to-play and hybrid monetization models. In that environment, game design doesn’t exist separately from progression, economies, retention, technology or the wider product strategy.
Understanding marketing can even make you a better designer. What makes your game immediately interesting when someone sees ten seconds of gameplay? Does it contain moments players naturally want to share? Can its strongest mechanics be communicated clearly in a screenshot or trailer? You shouldn’t design every feature around an advertisement, obviously, but understanding how players discover and choose games gives you a broader view of the product you’re helping to create.
The same goes for the wider games industry. Follow studios and developers, read postmortems, watch conference talks and pay attention to how different games perform. Build your network and talk to people working outside your own discipline. The more you understand about how games actually get made, marketed and operated, the better equipped you’ll be to make sensible design decisions.
4. Learn Game Design Theory
You can learn an enormous amount simply by making and playing games, but understanding game design theory gives you a framework for explaining what you’re seeing.
Games are systems of rules, choices and consequences. Depending on what you’re designing, you may need to think about space, time, actions, resources, skill, chance, rewards, punishment, competition, cooperation and dozens of other interacting elements. Even something as apparently simple as deciding how often a player receives a reward can involve probability, psychology, progression and game balance.
Take skill and chance as a basic example. A completely deterministic game may reward mastery but become predictable. Add chance and you can create uncertainty and excitement, but too much randomness may leave players feeling that their decisions don’t matter. Neither approach is automatically correct; understanding the theory helps you make those decisions deliberately rather than accidentally. Game design literature treats elements such as space, time, objects, actions, rules, skill and chance as fundamental building blocks of game mechanics.
There’s plenty of material available if you want to learn more: books, courses, conference talks, podcasts, developer postmortems and design blogs. Don’t worry about memorising every game design framework you encounter. Theory is most valuable when it gives you another way to think about a real problem.
5. Observe People Playing Games
If you want to understand game design, spend some time watching people play. Not a streamer explaining everything they’re doing to an audience, necessarily, but an actual player encountering a game and reacting naturally to it.
Pay attention to the little things. Did they immediately understand what to do, or did they hesitate? Did they become excited when they found a rare item? Did they laugh at something unexpected? Did they blame themselves when they lost, or did they blame the game? When did they lean forward and concentrate? When did they start looking at their phone?
Those reactions contain useful information. Games are interactive experiences, so what the player actually experiences matters more than what the designer intended them to experience. Playtesting is therefore different from simply checking whether a game works technically: its purpose is to find out whether the game creates the experience it was designed to create.
Different kinds of games can produce wildly different behaviour. Competitive PvP can create tension, rivalry and frustration, while co-op games can encourage communication and shared victories. A single-player narrative game might deliberately create completely different emotions. Art, animation, writing, sound and music can reinforce those reactions, which is why game design rarely exists in isolation from the other disciplines around it.
Learning to observe also means accepting that players will occasionally do something you never expected. They will ignore the enormous glowing objective marker you thought was impossible to miss. They’ll discover an unintended strategy, misunderstand a mechanic or spend twenty minutes playing with an object you considered completely unimportant. That’s not necessarily a problem; sometimes those unexpected behaviours lead to the most interesting discoveries.
Keep Designing
If you want to become a game designer, don’t wait until somebody gives you the job title before you start designing games. Build things now. They can be tiny, strange and unfinished. Design a card game, create a prototype, rebalance the economy of a game you like or write down a mechanic and figure out how you’d test it.
And don’t limit your inspiration to other games. Go hiking, visit a museum, watch a great film, play a sport, read about something you know nothing about or have a long conversation with someone who sees the world differently from you. Interesting game ideas can come from almost anywhere, and having interests beyond games will usually give you more interesting material to work with.
Most importantly, stay curious. Ask why something works, what would happen if you changed it and whether there’s another way to solve the same problem. Then prototype it, put it in front of somebody and find out.
We hope these tips help if you’re figuring out how to become a game designer or looking for ways to improve your existing game design skills. If you’re more interested in the visual side of development, take a look at our guide to landing a game artist job. And keep an eye on the Rumble Spark Games careers page for current opportunities.
