New student for game design any advice or programs I can Download??

Started by
6 comments, last by frob 2 years, 3 months ago

Any help would be awesome thank you in advance.

Advertisement

If I understand you correctly, you're asking about game design. Depending on the project size, Game Design be a considerable undertaking. From a programmer's point of view, I would start with pong, and expand the mechanics. From a technical or artistic side, there are options such as Unreal Engine or Unity. There's not really a software program for game design, except possibly a word processor. Game design generally involves a game design document.

@jmuhle90 , @piercingarrow is correct that a game designer's primary programs are not programming tools. A game designer should use Microsoft Word preferably over Google Docs, Microsoft Excel preferably over Google Sheets, and a simple graphics utility like Microsoft Paint is usually sufficient, but GIMP offers more functionality.

If these recommendations sound odd to you, then maybe you are using the term Game Design incorrectly.

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

Ok guys thank you. I am only in my 3rd month at Full Sail so I haven’t really got to explore much yet very excited for my journey though.

@Tom Sloper , I would agree with all of this. I'd also add in Microsoft PowerPoint if you want to get a little creative when describing your idea. It offers some crude animation functions that allow for a more richer way of describing a feature. Plus, the limited amount of information you could/should place on a slide can force you to express your ideas more concisely. I've seen many documents that kind of waffle on without anything obviously actionable for a developer.

Tom Sloper said:

@jmuhle90 , @piercingarrow is correct that a game designer's primary programs are not programming tools. A game designer should use Microsoft Word preferably over Google Docs, Microsoft Excel preferably over Google Sheets, and a simple graphics utility like Microsoft Paint is usually sufficient, but GIMP offers more functionality.

If these recommendations sound odd to you, then maybe you are using the term Game Design incorrectly.

I have just found these forums, and the game design gold mine they are, I am curious about your recommendation over there, why is microsoft word preferrable over google docs? Thanks!

Google Docs is okay for collaboration features, and it's free, both are in it's favor. The convenience factor is huge. But that's really about it for actual design documents.

Docs is terrible for long documents, cannot handle complex documents, can't do multi-part documents, and just won't cut it for many advanced features that are common in game design documents. Formatting of anything more complex then a term paper can be difficult in Word, but is impossible in Docs. While Google Docs (and drive generally) has some pretty neat security features, Word has it beat hands-down by being offline, shared as a specific version only where directly intended.

Similarly for Excel versus Sheets. The functionality differences are stark. Sure if you're summing cells or freezing a few rows they're similar, but if you're doing complex work common in game development Sheets is lacking. They've added a few absolutely-blocking features like pivot tables, but even so it's strongly limited in comparison. Graphs and charts have been added, but are still terrible for complex stuff, no pivot charts yet. If you need fancy plots the old standalone Excel is still the only option, or a third-party graphics program.

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement