Determining the purpose and type of audience

Game design can be made with material, educational, etc. objectives.

Note that you are not always going to make a game with the goal of generating income from the game; Especially at the beginning, you should change your perspective and make games with the intention of experience, skill acquisition and market research.

What is important is to specify the purpose and type of audience of the game; Because making a complete game takes at least three months day and night, and one endures a lot of hardships in this way.
Secondly, identifying the type of audience shows what age group your game is for, or more for women or men.

In many cases, the person does not intend to create a complete game from the beginning, but has other content and wants to attract more users by creating a game inside it.

Determining budget and time in game development

After you understand your goal, you need to estimate how much budget you have for game design.

Cost estimation helps you make the right decision and plan properly.

You must form a team based on the budget; Otherwise, making games will be nothing but a waste of time and money.

Any time you consider for making the game; At least three months should be added to this time for testing, marketing and publishing the game.

(Of course, in relation to the game development budget, there are many teams that develop the game in the form of shares, in such a way that they give shares to the team members in exchange for their salaries; of course, this method is not recommended by Manataz for some reasons. be.)

Game genre

Depending on whether your game is a simple platformer or an online shooter, you may need people who are experts in different areas.
The style of the game has an important influence on the choice of the game development team, the operating system and even the choice of the game engine.

Art design game

Two-dimensional or three-dimensional, the type of graphics, the type of character and environment designs, and many other graphic matters have an effect on the choice of game engine, because some game design engines offer their facilities based on that.

For example, Game Maker hardly supports 3D games, but it has many possibilities for making 2D games.

Artistic skills

You don’t need to know all aspects of art to make game graphics.

Although the more knowledge you have, the better result you will get, but game making engines help to implement graphic designs with their high graphics power.

As we said, in many game design engines, it is possible to design characters in 2D and 3D, modeling, etc., which makes your work easier.

Programming features

Each game engine supports a specific programming language.

There are different programming languages that can be difficult or easy to learn and code with.

Additionally, visual coding is a feature in game creation engines that allows developers to manipulate aspects of the game visually instead of tedious coding operations.

Create a team

Game making is a team and specialized work.
According to the type of content, a game needs to design game mechanisms and challenges, game characters, game environment images, sounds and music, story, execution, testing and marketing.

The success of a game development team depends on coordinated collaboration and careful project management.
Game development teams can be affiliated or independent.
Some big games have multiple studios that are affiliated with each other.

Some important members of the game development team are:

Developer and programming on the engine side
Artist and designer
Game designer to design game stages and challenges
3D or 2D modeler (depending on your game type)
ui-ux work
tester
marketer

Larger teams usually use several art designers, several programmers and several game designers, music and sound specialists, testers, etc.

game designer

In every game project (in fact, in all programming projects) it all starts with an idea.
But without proper implementation and organization, this idea is worthless and has no benefit.

As one of the most important roles of a game development team, the game designer is a person who is able to bring his ideas into the game and complete the details at all moments of its creation.

A game designer must have very strong organizational skills to maintain and organize all the assets and documents created by other members of the game development team.

He should study these documents and try to share the best ideas with the team members and after approval, give them to the game designer and the stage designer so that the process of implementing those ideas in the game continues.

The story of the designer

If your game is more complex than a simple hyper casual game, and has a story component, you probably need a story writer.
Having a story in making a game means having a narrative of how and where your game came from and where it is going.

Writing a story for a game is one of the most important steps in game design and is like a script for a movie.
Storytelling gives identity and originality to your game, where it starts, what obstacles and events it faces and where it goes.

stage designer

Almost every game consists of several stages, the difficulty of which should gradually increase or decrease.

New mechanics should also be introduced to the player in such a way that they do not disappoint him and are attractive.

The stage designer’s job is literally to bring the world designed by the game designer and story designer into the world of game programming.

Game programmer

Different game design teams use game engines such as Unity or Unreal engine, because these engines, with a very large and relatively simple framework, help game developers connect different parts of the game with less effort.
It can be said that any person in the game development team who participates in programming and working with these game engines is called a game developer or game programmer.

Developers are responsible for creating the logic and behavior of game entities as envisioned by the game design team.

They are responsible for implementing any tools used in this process.

Note that there may be more than one programmer on the game development team.

In fact, the number of game developers is determined based on the complexity of the game and the technologies used in making the game, such as augmented reality, etc.

Technical artist

Technical artist is somehow both an art-graphic role and a programming role.
But he can only have conceptual knowledge in these roles, not technical knowledge for implementation.
In general, the technical artist is to establish a proper relationship between graphic artists and developers.
For this reason, it is very important that language and science cover both sides in order to establish a correct and logical communication without causing problems.
This is not the only technical artist task, and for a full description of this role and its tasks, go to the technical artist article.

Artists

Each game has its own graphics.
Games have many graphic styles.
But finally, they will be divided into two general categories, 2D and 3D.
Depending on the type of graphics of the project, graphic artists are usually needed to implement the visual parts of the project, design environments, characters, objects, etc.

Animator

An animator is someone who has to keyframing 2D images or 3D models to create animation.
Although many 3D models can be animated directly in game engines and do not require an animator, note that these movements and animation capabilities made in game engines are very limited.
Most of the narrative and story animations in the game are made outside of the game engines and by a separate team.

So many complex animations are created with professional software such as Anime Studio (for 2D images) and Maya (for 3D models).

UI-UX

The game has a user interface and user experience.
The task of the UI-UX department is primarily to create a concept and road map to access different departments.
Then it will be time to implement designs, pages, icons, backgrounds, etc.

sound engineer

None of the games you are making can be without sound effects and game sounds.
There are many sounds in the game design, such as explosions, environmental sounds, object sounds, etc.

If you can search the internet for the sounds you need in the game, but you need to know exactly what you are looking for.

project manager

In order to closely monitor the budget, adhere to game development schedules and coordinate the performance of different roles in the game development team, a committed and caring person who is more or less familiar with all aspects of game development is needed. The project manager does this.

This role is one of the most important things that we introduced in this article.

The project manager is a person with high organizational skills.
Because it should be in contact with all the roles introduced in this article.

If the project manager is impatient and lacks proper work ethic or doesn’t treat the team members well, the game design will become a nightmare for all team members and the game will never be finished.
The project manager should hold regular weekly or monthly meetings with team members to keep the game development process seamless.

So be sure to be careful in choosing the right person.

Project documentation

One of the most important steps in the game development process that is usually ignored is the discussion of documentation and document preparation before starting work.
As much as the game was very interesting in concept and before it started, but because of not documenting everything, it got out of control.

Choosing a game engine

A game engine is a program or framework with the help of which game makers can make different parts of their game faster and advance all game development processes at the same time.

Game engines have high graphic power and are actually a combination of several software.

Which game engine should you choose?

Some people think that a game engine that has the most possible features is a great game engine.
But this notion is wrong in many cases.

In general, which of these game engines you choose will be determined based on the things that we will discuss next.

Quality control and testing

Looking at the number of bugs in today’s titles, it can be concluded that even large companies suffer from poor quality control processes.

The problem is that the players are used to such an attitude that the game must be flawless.
Although this attitude is never completely possible, it is better to respect it and carefully plan the influencing factors in quality control.

It usually takes a long time to finish making the game. So, it is better to fix all its disadvantages and release a complete and error-free version of the game with patience.

Therefore, a QA professional should be familiar with QA principles and have enough passion for the game genre they are involved in.
In game development teams, quality control is the responsibility of game testers.
In addition to the things mentioned above, these people must have a good experience as a player and have a critical mind.

They should be engaged in examining aspects of the game throughout the game design process so that the problems of the game are not accumulated at each stage.

It is also suggested that the game be available to users in its beta and trial version before release, so that positive and negative feedback can be received from it.