Well recently I've been looking for ways to get me more involved in game design since hopefully I will be a game designer in the future. While looking, I've noticed that several sites claim that getting into video game modding sites can give you more experience in game design. So I was wondering how this is possible? Unless you knew how to program, you wouldn't be able to do much. I guess you could come up with ideas for mods but do experienced programmers really need your ideas?

]How much you can do with modding depends on the game. And there are different levels of programming. Programming at the engine level (C/C++) and then programming at the application level using a built in scripting language. If you want to make a certain type of project, and it's suited to UDK, then there is no reason to program your own game engine. Throw your assets into UDK, and program their custom behavior.

When I was young I started out modding various games. I gained tons of skills and experience. I knew the ins and outs of the game engines I was modding before I even learned to write a single line of code.


A lot of commercial games these days (Wheel Man, Mortal Kombat vs DC, Mortal Kombat, etc..) are just stand alone Unreal mods (in a way).

Heretic and Hexen were basically DOOM mods with different assets.

Modding Neverwinter Nights gives you access to world building tools, a scripting language, and asset creation. You can make almost anything. All the expansion packs for NWN were just mods made with the same tools the users had. The only difference was that they could patch in some new features, and had the budget to produce high quality assets.

I don't think you understand. I am not trying to get experience with programing, I know almost nothing about programing, I'm trying to get experience with game designing. I don't see how getting involved with a game modding community can give you experience with designing games.

"Well recently I've been looking"

Why does nearly everyone on gamedev.net start every post they write with "well?" What's with that? I can't be the only person that's noticed that. No offense intended, I mean, it doesn't bother me. Just an observation.

For an actual answer, yes, modding gives you experience, and if you don't know how to mod a particular game, learn the tool(s) provided for/associated with it.

The advantage of modding is that a lot of the really tricky stuff, like rendering, is already taken care of for you and you're free to focus on implementing your ideas.

You might as well work on a mod or similar. If you can't think of any other way to "prove" yourself as someone capable of doing something.

Having some familiarity with programming is important for designing. Just coming up with an idea and telling someone about it is not design. Design involves much more than that. If you think of Design as the driving force that gets an idea implemented, it is a better mind set to be in.

Pretty much anyone can come up with an idea. And most people can have a good go at describing the idea in a way that it can be implemented by other developers. It is the Designer that takes these basic ideas and gets them to a point where they get implemented.

Of course, as part of a design team, you are not expected to do all the bits yourself (that is why it is a team), but you should be at least able to do them to some degree (if not an expert, at least know what is involved). Also, as a lone designer (say as part of a small modding team, or as a single person developer), you will actually have to do all the design work yourself.

This means you need to learn some programming, even if it just basic scripting to allow you to modify the stats of a game character.

At some point, no matter the size of the team or skill of the other developers, you will want something implemented in a certain way. This will entail you describing the system in a way the programmers can work with (psudocode) or doing it yourself (scripting).

Since Design is getting your ideas implemented, then getting involved with a modding community is exactly the experience you need to be a designer. Just coming up with ideas and writing them down does not make you a designer (or half the world would be game designers).