LIVE ONLINE COURSE
3 MAY - 21 JUNE 2023
Duration:
8 WEEKS
MONDAYS & WEDNESDAYS
5 PM PST / 8 PM EST
Brainstorm stories, rules, and challenges that engage and entertain your player personas.
Join Rob Gallerani, Senior Principal Game Designer at Blizzard Entertainment, to concept game stories that sell.
THIS COURSE IS FOR YOU, IF...
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YOU WANT TO BREAK INTO THE GAME INDUSTRY
What’s the full scope of Game Design? Learn all the hats a designer wears and practice everything from business models to basic prototyping.
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YOU WANT TO BUILD YOUR OWN GAME FROM SCRATCH
Got some ideas? Great! Get hands-on experience with conception as you build a portfolio-ready game and review it with Rob.
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YOU ARE A JUNIOR GAME DEVELOPER
Expand your practical game knowledge on best practices and tools as you learn the ropes of working for a large game company.
Understand the vision behind every game decision.
The industry is booming! Over 3 billion people play video games worldwide. Get a modern bird’s-eye view of rules, mechanics, and plots that will allow you to evoke the right aesthetics.
Let your career thrive by learning LIVE.
Personalized feedback. Group discussions. Networking opportunities. All are available when you hop in the ELVTR and join us!
The icing on the cake? Job interview tips!
Lay the groundwork for a game by actualizing profitable player personas and pitching your creation to your team. Also, practice unraveling any complex game when you turn a digital game into a card prototype.
Prove you’ve mastered game logic. Create an executable card or board game or challenge yourself to develop a video / mobile game design underneath real-world time constraints that you can show your next employer.
DEVELOPMENT
Learn how to sell yourself to game companies. With direct feedback from Rob, he’ll show you how to interview successfully and provide recommendation letters to outstanding students.
GALLERANI LinkedIn Profile
- Rob Gallerani, Senior Principal Game Designer at Blizzard Entertainment
- 21+ years of experience in the gaming industry
- Shipped 30+ games including Diablo II: Resurrected, numerous Tony Hawk Pro Skater games, and Guitar Hero
- Speaks publicly at the Game Developer Conference and at internal summits for Activision, Blizzard, and King Digital Entertainment
- Loves obstacle course racing, boardgames, ARGs, escape rooms, and blacksmithing
COURSE INTRODUCTION
Learn about the roles, needed contributions, and expectations of a game designer during game development.
- What is design as it relates to game creation?
- A game designer’s day: design pipelines in active production
- Game designer’s role & responsibilities
- A champion for the player
- Types of Fun
Break down the metrics of successful game design and learn to gauge its performance and target audience consistently.
- Understanding your stakeholders
- Using pillars to support your vision
- Player personas
- Designing within constraints: scope/time/resources
- Workshop: Creating personas
Assignment #1: Define the type(s) of fun you want your game to be. Outline your game pillars, and who it is for.
You can’t have a game without a business model. Find out why. Get knowledge about standard business models and learn how to integrate them into your games.
- Exploring current and past business models
- The dreaded “pay-to-win”
- The pros and cons of cosmetics
- Tailoring models to a global audience
Experiment with the brainstorming techniques that top companies use to set a vision for their game.
- How to set a vision
- The first paragraph of your Game Design Document
- Why theming matters: tone & art style
- The micro and meta game experience: The 1/1/1 stages of fun
- Brainstorming techniques
- Workshop: Brainstorming a game concept
Assignment #2: Define your business model. Create 2-4 wholly unique Game Design Document (GDD) first paragraph ideas.
When you pitch your game, you also pitch its narrative. Learn what a narrative consists of and how it’s more than just dialogue.
- Breaking down the narrative
- The power of interactive narratives
- Targeting your pitch to the audience
- Using a slide deck
- Alternative pitching methods
- Keeping the game’s core in focus
Assignment #3: Pick one of your game ideas and create a pitch deck of 5 slides. Choose PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, or any alternative tool. The pitch should take no longer than 3 minutes. Get ready to present in the next class!
There’s no “i” in “team”, but there is in “excitement” and “vision”. In this class, you’ll practice pitching exciting ideas and coming up with ways to test them.
- Workshop: Break out into groups and pitch your game concept to each other
- Failing fast: define what questions you need to answer first
- Prototype planning
- Discovering the gap between rules and play dynamics
Take your original game idea and dive deeper into it. Use your newly discovered prototyping techniques to flesh out initial ideas and develop game rules.
- How to paper-prototype a digital game
- Workshop: Turn a digital game into a card game
- The first page of the Game Design Document
- Write the rules of your game
- Create aesthetics (fun) through mechanics (rules)
Assignment #4: Write your Game Design Document (GDD) between 1-4 pages. This should cover all mechanics and rules, and have an example or two using personas.
In this class, you’ll learn the relationship between rules and player behavior. You’ll also get a better grasp on player motivation loops and how to adjust them to your original game.
- The differences between player skill and character strength
- Encouraging behavior loops with player motivators
- The many win conditions
- Game economies
- The MDA process
Here’s your chance to improve! This lesson will teach you how to ask the right questions and draw out useful feedback from playtesting and data collection.
- Asking the right questions
- Hosting a playtest session
- How to read data
- Quantitative data
Assignment #5:
Step 1. Define what 2-4 questions need to be solved with your prototype, and how you can find the answers quickly.
Step 2. Create and play your paper prototype at least 3 times. Observe and write down desired, undesired, and unexpected player behaviors.
Step 3. Play your game again, and try to change certain mechanics to impact the way players are playing the game. Adjust your GDD accordingly and submit it with a note on what has been improved.
As the game designer, you dictate player behaviors. It’s time to figure out what changes encourage or discourage certain actions.
- How to ignore data
- Identifying qualitative themes
- Don’t break good rules because of bad content
- Balance to your goals
- Tools for balance
- Balancing data vs. balancing players
In this lesson, you’ll navigate the skills that a player must execute to perform certain moves and actions.
- What is a skill and muscle memory?
- Skill ceilings and skill floors
- Input types: controller, mouse, touch screen
- Combat fundamentals
- Platforming fundamentals
- PVP vs. PVE
Let’s start some problems…for the players, of course. You’ll go over the tools provided to your players to help them problem-solve and create tasks that challenge them.
- Introduce, Practice, Mastery framework for mechanics
- AI, where simple is best
- Level design
- How to give players problems and tools to solve them
This class will focus on puzzle design. You will learn to add secrets, mental puzzles, or other tests of logic to your game.
- Puzzles, secrets, and ARGs
- When and who to have puzzles for
- Encryption methods
- Community engagement
- Case Study: Destiny 2 Puzzle post-mortem
- Case Study: Diablo II: Resurrected Puzzle post-mortem
Assignment #6:
Part 1. Update your Game Design Document (GDD) with metrics. This should set the guidelines for any AI, level, or other challenge creation.
Part 2. (optional)
Create a puzzle or riddle. It can be part of your project game design or an independent challenge.
Now that you’ve learned the fundamentals you’ll have the opportunity to adjust them as you approach a mobile-centric game.
- Ergonomics
- Screen time
- Design considerations
- Test opportunities
You’ve leveled up your games, and now it’s time to level up your career! By the end of this class, you’ll feel confident knowing how to land a job in the industry.
- Setting a goal for your future role
- Shifting to design from another discipline within games
- Writing a resume
- Building a portfolio
- Interview tips: In-person vs. Virtual
- Presenting your best self
Assignment #7: Go make great games! Finalize the sample Game Design Document you created in this course and add it to your portfolio or online profile (e.g. LinkedIn). Submit your portfolio or online profile for review.
What our students say
"I absolutely love the format! Working through real life scenarios makes it super applicable and easy to translate the learning into practical takeaways. I also enjoy that the assignments are straightforward enough to get through but you can make them more complex to get more learning out of the course. It really is a format where you get out what you put in."
"The group activities, they allow us to interact and exchange ideas, plus the way it is structured is challenging and mind twisting as we collaborate in different parts of the ideation."
"Overall I'm impressed with the level of detail and explanation around particular topics and subjects. There's a real depth to each module which for learning allows the information to stay in your brain."
"I really enjoy the format of the course. Lectures with real life examples and an ongoing case study. Also built in 20 minutes at the end of each class for questions is helpful."
"I enjoyed the structure of the class. I like how we learned about a topic and practiced it in the workshops. It’s helped me to apply what I learned!"