Many people think that game design is the easiest part of game development because game designers don''t have to do any programming or art. Actually, I think it''s the hardest part of development. A designer has to come up with the WHOLE game, every aspect of it from story to weapons to items and anything else that exists in the game world and that the player will see and interact with. This is definitely the most creative part of game making, and creativity is a very elusive and complex thing. It''s very easy to make "a pac-man clone" but it''s much harder to make "an original game".

Therefore if you''re thinking about going into game design because you are not a programmer or an artist, know that this is definitely not an easier route than the other two, it is most probably much harder.

P.S.
I know I''ll probably get flamed by all the programmers on this message board for this, but just so you know, I''m a programmer myself.

You could sort of think of it as a computer games engineer.
You have to come up with all the components and then tell everyone else to actually do it. This can sometimes be much trickier than expected.

like others have said, game design isn''t programming, it isn''t art, and it isn''t writing the story either. It is an engineering discipline. You build a game out of parts: the genre, the interface, the combat system, specific things to your game, etc.. The designer is the one who balances things so that a wide variety of strategies are viable, using the fewest components possible.

I would say that design is along the lines of the previous two posts more so than the first few. I think of design as system architecture design. This is the discipline (yes like engineering) where good design skills are a must. Designing software is different than designing a function or writing a block of code. As someone alluded to earlier it is about tying all the major aspects of the code base together into something that is elegant, maintainable, easily debuggable, expandable, generic and robust. This is a pretty tall order. In my experience this is much more difficult than being that one person in charge of doing the graphic engine, or the guy who writes the communication model.

When many people on this forum talk about design I have the feeling that they are really talking about storyboarding, interface creation, character creation and story writing. It would probably be best if this pursuit was called game concept design rather than "game design."

Just my little rant but personally I don''t consider a game designer to be the person who comes up with the story. I call that person a concept writer and and a look-and-feel designer. At my workplace the head designer is the person who comes up with the system architecture, documents the system architecture, acts as project technical lead, makes technical decisions (this tech vs that one, this system design vs. that one.) I think the third designers is talking about what would probably be refered to as the producer or project manager, not the production company mind you but the non-tech related person who ties all the pieces together.

Having experience with both production and project technical lead I can tell you that they are two completely different things. They take completely different skills and I think that it is naive to say that production/management is more difficult than system architecture design and project tech lead. One involves interaction with management hierarchies, marketings, sales, cross department communication and the other involves knowledge of highly technical information. The hardest part about being a tech lead and lead designer is that you don''t learn large scale design in any school. You gotta learn it through experience.


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