I am a college student studying game programming and set to graduate by the end of 2023. I am at the point where I need to starting putting serious focus into my career goals and working on skills that I will need to continue developing even after school. One specialization that fascinates me is that of a gameplay designer. I love the idea of conceptualizing gameplay systems for games and working being able to work closely with technical, artistic, and business teams on a project. This is a long term goal as I don't expect to find any game design job right out of college.

What skills can I focus on developing outside of industry experience that help prepare for this role?

Is there anything I can focus on in my portfolio work to show my skills as a designer?

What entry level job opportunities should I go for to get closer to become a gameplay designer?

Any other general advice on this subject would also be greatly appreciated.

While auxiliary skills are undoubtedly useful, the most important skill is the most obvious one: designing games. Don't wait until you are hired to do this. Don't wait for a school assignment to do this. Don't wait for someone to tell you how to do this. Start designing right away.

You might say that you can't make a game on your own, but the goal isn't to create a game. The goal is to create a game design. Also, look into creating physical games (board games, card games), which you really can create all by yourself without any programming skills or art skills.

I'm surprised Tom didn't link to his excellent site, but like so many topics, he has a FAQ page for this.

There is also an Extra Credits video from a decade ago that still applies. The most important thing is: Everything.

Since you can't gain skills in everything, gain skills in as many broad areas as you reasonably can. If something interests you, dig in.

@fleabay Yes part of my work list term is to look at a role in game development and break it down. It also requires me to engage with game development communities to get feedback and better understanding on the role I'm interested in. The reason I don't do this more is because I usually find myself getting responses that don't further my knowledge but just shame me for reaching out. These are questions I wrote based on what I needed and wanted to know not only for school but for my career. If you have any better questions I could ask to get more insight I would love to hear them.

elden.julien said:
It also requires me to engage with game development communities to get feedback and better understanding on the role I'm interested in.

Good if you do it on your own, but lazy for the teacher to assign it. Sad. This applies, and you might send it on to your teacher. I've taught some college classes for two years as adjunct faculty and fully agree with that post, Tom taught game courses for 15 and wrote the rant. It's hard to blame the teachers since it isn't immediately obvious why it is ineffective for teaching, they're trying but doing it badly, and you can't really blame the students for doing what was assigned. It's not terrible, but also not great.

elden.julien said:
If you have any better questions I could ask to get more insight I would love to hear them.

The difficult part is that the questions need to come from you. We can pose questions and answer them, but that isn't where learning happens, or at least, not effectively.

Coming up with the questions means the student must venture around in the darkness a little bit, exploring until the student hits something they don't understand, then struggling with it enough to create the questions. The exploration and discovery of questions is what makes the questions valuable, getting the answers is what makes them click and gain meaning. That is the point where learning happens.

A good teacher with novice students will set up safe environments that have interesting bits to explore, and will be able to answer questions that follow. Once a student is prepared to go out a little bit, and has explored safe environments, then it is time to send students out into the wilds where it is more dangerous, more prickly, more uncontrolled. That clearly wasn't what happened here.