Do you really want to be a Game Designer?

Let me tell you what others won’t say to you. Making a game won’t magically turn you into a Game Designer.

That might have been true years ago, but now the market is bigger, and games are much more complex. Collecting game design tips, reading books, and making a bunch of games to piece up a small portfolio is not enough anymore. These are all commodities nowadays; anyone could do them (even without much effort). If all you have is that, you’ve no chance to be a professional game designer.

You’ll end up frustrated, disappointed, and worse, you risk losing the burning passion that made you start in the first place. You need to reroute your main path to analytical thinking because that’s what makes a real game designer thrive (and what companies will actually ask you).

In this post, I’ll give you 7 fundamental traits you need to master to become an Analytical Game Designer so you can sharpen your thinking tools and outpace everyone else.

Being A Game Designer Is Not Enough

"Everyone can become a Game Designer".

Is it true? Mmh, it depends on what you mean by "become".

If you're pointing at having a game designed with your name on it, yeah, that's available to pretty much anyone. Instead, if you mean becoming a professional who can solve complex design problems, withstand any industry's big shifts, and analyze any scenario with an X-ray sight, that's another story. I bet you don't just want to make a game but learn game design, right?

If it's your ambition (and I'm sure it is), you have a long way to go.

You can't just "become a Game Designer". Also, let me tell you something important. No achievement or event will make you one day wake up as a Game Designer. It's a learning journey you can only start and never end.

And trust me, the issue is not to keep moving on but to start in the right direction. Nothing can stop you when you are at full throttle because you understand the right path to take and how to reach what you want.

Most aspiring Game Designers struggle right away at the beginning, and the journey actually never starts.

Some of them focus on getting a degree, believing that's what they need to bridge the gap. Others completely ignore theory, thinking it's useless, and only focus on mindless practice, practice, practice. Some others lose themselves in a tutorial hell pit of Unity/Unreal YouTube videos and never get out.

All these approaches have the same flaw at their base. They never really face Game Design as a discipline.

They orbit around it without ever really understanding its core elements and principles.

No wonder a lot of people cry, "I don't understand how game design actually works!".

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So, being a Game Designer is not enough anymore.

At least not the “Guesswork Game Designer” profile you find in books and game design institutional courses. They essentially describe a magician who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

The design process they propose is fundamentally trial-and-error. You come up with a random idea, try it out with a prototype, and see if it’s fun. I don’t want to open up the chapter on the concept of “fun” now since I don’t like to get pissed off just a few words in, but that’s not a design process.

Anyone can do that because you don’t need any real competence.

“But you need to know how to code to make a prototype; that’s a skill!”

You’re right, but do you see game design thinking in this? That’s programming, not design.

The “design part” is just trying your idea out and then judging it by the fuzziest criterion ever conceived, which is “fun”. Despite that, a lot of designers manage to make games. How do they do it? They keep on with trial and error until they have built up sufficient experience working in the field.

And that’s where the core issue lies.

By doing that, you’re not learning anything about Game Design.

You’re just building up a pile of random tips, tricks, and supposed magic formulas. You believe you learned something because you feel progression, but that’s fake. That’s like advancing a colored score bar in a game through grinding.

You see the numbers go up, but there’s nothing concrete behind it. Learning small tips, game design pills, or generic concepts stolen from psychology won’t make you understand how games work at their base ground.

That’s the exact opposite of how to approach game design correctly with an analytical mind.

If you want to learn how games work, an analytical approach is not an option; it’s necessary. The more you believe you need to just practice and make games, the further away from it you become.

You won’t learn to make games out of magic just by making them. If you hear this advice, you know you’re facing someone who doesn’t know what it’s talking about. He will mostly do it without malicious intent, but probably because that’s what has worked for him in the past.

We’re not in the 90s anymore; it doesn’t work.

Instead, you must focus on high-impact activities for a Game Designer.

What are high-impact activities? They are learning activities that make you progress in at least one of the 7 main traits of an Analytical Game Designer. So, when studying Game Design, ask yourself: “What Analytical Game Designer traits am I pushing forward?”.

The more, the better.

So, without further ado, here they are for you.

7 Essential Traits You Need To Master To Become An Analytical Game Designer

To become a kick Game Designer, you first need to know what it looks like.

Keep in mind that these traits are not simple boxes to check. Each of them involves its own world of knowledge and skills. You have no hope of becoming a first-class in all of them in a couple of months or so. Remember, it’s a journey that takes time and effort.

The more you train these traits, the more you lean toward the Analytical Game Designer profile.

Let’s go.

Trait #1: Solid Game Design Knowledge

Let's start with the main dish.

You have no chance of becoming a successful Analytical Game Designer if you have a fuzzy knowledge of Game Design. Heck, you're a game designer! If you're not the ultimate expert on your discipline, who should be?

You need to focus on being a T-shaped professional.

Specialize in one game design branch and focus most of your time on learning that. At the same time, study other branches.

If you want to become a Gameplay Designer, you must also study Level Design, System Design, UX, etc. You need to be a specialist, but you can't close yourself in a bunker, ignoring everything else. You don't need to master everything, but you need to understand how other disciplines work.

Remember that game design is always a team effort and that knowledge makes you:

• Give more precise feedback
• Collaborate better through empathy
• Understand requirements
• Detect problems upfront

Also, I assure you that you'll improve your main specialization too!

The more solid your Game Design knowledge, the more capable and adaptable you are.

Unfortunately, studying game design can be full of traps and holes in the ground you can fall into.

At least avoid one mistake many beginner game designers make.

Don't focus only on practice. You won't learn game design by following a "How to make a game in Unity" YouTube tutorial.

That's not game design. You have a copy of an insignificant small game made by someone else, as do all the hundreds of thousands of people who followed that tutorial. But what did you learn? I'll answer for you: nothing besides a bunch of Unity functionalities that will probably change in a few months.

You didn't learn anything because the tutorial made all the thinking for you. And guess what, that "thinking" is exactly what game design is all about.

Remember, game design is a discipline; treat it as that.

Trait #2: Game Development Fundamentals

The keyword here is "collaboration", and it's super important.

Game Design is just one piece (the most crucial though) of the big Game Development puzzle. You can't properly work in a team if you don't understand how it operates.

In a Game Dev studio, especially a big one, many professionals must work in sync like an orchestra. So, you must understand how the work flows in the development process and where you fit in the working pipeline. If you don't, you'll bounce around like a ping pong ball, waste your time, and, worse, waste others' time.

This will make you highly unreliable, and if you're not lucky, it may even cost you the job.

Of course, you don't need to replace their duties; that will also be bad.

You need to study how programmers, artists, producers, etc., work on the game, their requirements, and how their jobs relate to yours. If you have no clue, just ask them.

You can also pick someone up on LinkedIn and shoot a message with a question. They will be happy most of the time to see you interested in their work. As a plus, if you do this in a team, you'll also strengthen the bond between team members, which is always good.

Being an expert game designer also involves looking at how everything works around you.

Game Development disciplines are all connected and feed information into each other. Professionals don't live in silos by excluding everyone else from their work. If you close yourself in the "game design bunker", you won't be adaptable. And, even worse, you can't leverage your team members as much as they can't fully leverage your expertise.

Studying is always the foundation for everything you do.

So, the more you learn about related game design subjects, the more valuable your skills will become.

Trait #3: Strong Social Skills

Game design (and development in general) is always a team effort.

Like in any team scenario, the quality of the performance is strongly driven by the quality of the relationships. Being an asshole, not thinking critically, and being a "people-pleaser" is the perfect recipe for disaster.

Communication is big, so you can't take who you're talking with for granted. If you do, team members will soon "hear you without listening". They will judge you as soon as you open your mouth without actually considering your arguments.

You must do your part to contribute to shaping a better team environment.

Always focus on creating and maintaining a team culture where collaboration and honest feedback are the norm.

As I told you in the previous trait, team collaboration is crucial in game development. For an Analytical Game Designer, good feedback comes naturally.

"What's good feedback anyway?" you might ask.

Good feedback has 3 features:

• Specific: It highlights a clear thing, not a general fuzzy concept.
• Motivated: It has supportive arguments about why that thing doesn't work (or does).
• Honest: It says what needs to be said, not what the person wants to hear.

Very few people can give good feedback.

Also, you must receive feedback well without turning it into personal judgments.

You have to learn how to use ****critical thinking and empathy. Most importantly, treat discussions as a way to face a problem, not a way to face each other.

But there's more.

Being a reliable team member also means having self-confidence.

Don't get me wrong right away. This has nothing to do with arrogance or authority.

It's about knowing what you know and that your competencies can greatly value the team. Being confident is part of the Social Skills you need to be a trustworthy team member. However, don't push too hard, or you'll become overconfident.

This will translate into misjudgments and annoying behaviors inside the team. It's a thin line; you must keep questioning yourself daily to strike the right balance.

That's why strong Social Skills are not so common, and managing an interdisciplinary team is so damn hard.

Social Skills are sometimes called "Soft Skills" but are far from soft.

Trait #4: Analytical Thinking

This is one of the most essential skills for an Analytical Game Designer.

It has 2 dimensions. The first one is the most commonly known, which is analyzing games while playing them. The second, instead, is less common yet much more important: analyzing your game while designing it.

Playing a game is never a passive activity for an Analytical Game Designer.

You can't sit on your couch and just enjoy the experience. You should do it, too, since your perspective as a player is important, but that shouldn't be the only way.

Instead, a huge chunk of your brain must be devoted to dissecting that experience from a game design point of view. That's a great way to understand game systems' state of the art and discover smart solutions to hard problems.

Analyzing games means asking yourself questions like:

• Does that mechanic fit the game context? Why?
• How does that system work? What are its core elements?
• What message or emotion is that element conveying?
• If I add/remove this, how will it shape the rest of the game?

You must reflect on everything you see, hear and feel.

Don't worry about obsessively acquiring this mindset. You won't achieve it by just playing; it's a direct consequence of studying game design.

You move away from the player's perspective and see things you were unaware of before.

The other side of the coin of analytical thinking comes during the actual design process.

Your most important skill is understanding the current state of the game you're designing at a glance. Without it, you're mostly going blind and random.

You don't know what you're doing and why, so you only add or remove things that "feel" right to you. This is a big red flag for a Game Designer. It tells me that you can't think about the structure of the game, its anatomy. You don't engineer your ideas; you throw them randomly to see what happens.

If you can't analyze what you have on your plate, you can't think deeply about it because you don't have its pieces. In your eyes, a pattern simply happens, but you don't know why.

An Analytical Game Designer, instead, is a kickass problem solver who can scan all the elements in a scenario and think about possible solutions.

Trait #5: Technical Knowledge

This is a pain point for most Game Designers.

I'll tell you right away. You're not an Analytical Game Designer if you delegate all the technical stuff to others.

I'm not telling you that as a badge of dishonor or something, it affects your competencies. You can't fully leverage the iteration cycle since you must wait for someone else to create prototypes for you. This greatly lengthens the time of your design process and increases mistakes.

Don't be like some game designers who avoid all technical stuff as much as possible because they only want to design. An Analytical Game Designer never fears technology but uses it to improve his work.

The most important piece of tech you need to master is the Game Engine, and you must be able to work safely in it.

Creating prototypes, balancing values, using engine tools, creating blockouts, etc. These things are crucial for you to build a solid ground base for your designs.

It's not about knowing how to code professionally; you're not a programmer. Your goal is not to code the game; you just need to master the technical tools for prototyping to evaluate your design decisions. This sometimes means writing a bit of code and sometimes just learning complex software.

A Game Engine is where everything happens, and you can't ever ignore it.

As I often say, the vast majority of your work as a Game Designer is in your head.

You turn ideas into game systems by following the Game Direction. The more expert you are, the more this is evident.

However, during the Game Design process, you eventually need to see what you've designed in action. Why? Because a game is a system, and you'll see its emergent properties only when someone is playing it. If you don't put to the test what's in your head, you create a fake reality, and when in production, the true reality comes, and it kicks your butt pretty hard.

That's why prototyping is not just a phase of the process. Quickly switching between your head and the prototype is a mandatory part of your thinking.

Seeing the game as a dynamic system gives you food for thought to understand what's good and what's not.

Trait #6: Multimedia Cultural Background

Game Design is strictly linked to culture.

You need to voraciously explore every media with curiosity and an analytical mindset. Playing games is good, but if you stop there, your creativity will stagnate.

Real innovation comes from outside the gaming medium, not the inside. Explore movies, literature, music, comics, paintings, etc. Most of the time, the best ideas and creative solutions are out there waiting to be discovered.

Unfortunately, most designers only look at other games, leaving a lot of game design potential on the table.

Games, like any art form, are communication channels between human beings carrying intentional meaning.

Meaningful experiences make a game stick in the player’s mind. It is a game with an interesting perspective about something that deeply resonates and goes way beyond the “Quit Game” button.

That’s where your cultural background plays a crucial role. You won’t have anything interesting to say with your game if you know nothing. Your game will exist just for the sake of it, and it won’t make an impact on the player’s mind.

A game is not just a toy to mindlessly play with. But it’s your job as an Analytical Game Designer to make it more than that.

This is often ignored, but it’s what makes the difference between a dabbler and a professional.

It’s not enough to have an idea and start coding. Designing your initial seed means nurturing it by creating a coherent web of meanings.

You need to link what the player does in the game with the meaning you want to convey through your game. It’s not an easy task, but this way of thinking makes you a real kick-ass Analytical Game Designer. Your mind thinks in terms of game experience rather than just game features.

Producers and marketers are features-focused, but you’re a game designer and need to reason beyond that.

There’s a reason why you made a design decision, and that must be something about a topic you know deeply because you cultivated it in your cultural background.

Trait #7: Work In Progress Mindset

This could sound so clichè to you.

If it does, that’s good because it means you have digested well enough. But I want to push it to you nonetheless because it’s super important. You must be humble enough to know you’ll never cross the finish line.

As I’ve said at the beginning, there’s no day you’ll become a Game Designer.

You, as anyone, are always a work in progress.

Every time you learn something new, you discover what you still don’t know.

Game Design is a vast discipline, more than people think, and reaching a complete understanding of it is almost impossible. You’ll learn things but forget about other things through time because you don’t exercise them as much as you should. That’s fine.

You need to accept it and know there’s always something to learn. Don’t take for granted that you know everything about a topic, especially after receiving praise or a reward.

Never stop studying new things to improve your skills.

Remember that theory and practice are 2 sides of the same coin (and good theory is always practically applicable). Be eager to learn new things but resist the urge to dive into the industry’s trenches, shouting, “I’ll learn by doing”.

You’ll be bombarded with many stimuli, and your brain will not be trained to capture and analyze them correctly. You may feel overwhelmed by everything you can learn, but don’t worry. Approach everything with a curiosity mindset and one step at a time.

If you make it a habit and put in the necessary effort, time will do the rest.

In life, there are no achievements, only milestones.

The Future Of Game Design Is Analytical And You Must Be Too

The game industry has changed a lot in a short period.

This is clear for both players and game designers. Games have more complex systems linked to each other, sparking many emergent behaviors that are hard to manage.

Making a game takes much more time, money, and people than ever. If you imagine the vast majority of games released in the '80s and '90s coming out today, they would probably be too simplistic. You can code a game from the '80s in an afternoon, but designing a "real "game of today requires a huge effort.

Why is that?

The answer lies in front of you right now.

I mean technology. The quick pace of change in technical capabilities pushed forward games like few things in history.

New devices, easier coding patterns, more sophisticated game engines that do a lot for you, faster and more powerful hardware, etc. All of this allowed game designers to design more complex features and make bigger games. I love technology, so this is super exciting, and I'm always thrilled about what's next. However, you must not leave game design behind. You can't afford it; no one can.

No matter what new tech can make things easier, you must always design your game.

The game design process is inevitable. You still need to choose the rules of your game and, most importantly, the experience you want to generate for players. You do not do this with technology like game engines or what have you.

You need your brain to function properly and think the right way.

This is where general game design advice from veterans falls short.

You can't just come up with an idea that resembles your favorite game. Push some buttons in a game engine like Unity or Unreal. And lastly, refine some bits and pieces randomly using some design tips and tricks you picked up from a blog or a YouTube video. If you're settling for that, do it, but know it's not learning game design, and you're not building any skills.

You're just collecting a set of patterns without focusing on foundational knowledge. You move on in your design process without actually knowing what you're doing.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that Analytical Game Designers don't work that way, do I?

The worst part of this approach is that you're lying to yourself.

You believe you already know everything because you are an expert player, so you only need to practice. That's a narrative you tell yourself because your brain wants the path of least resistance. Fight against it!

Maybe you blindly fell to the common saying that "theory is useless".

This reaction makes sense to me, actually. It's natural to think that practice makes perfect (and in some cases, it's even true), especially in a field that is so hands-on as making games.

Yet, the catch missing is that you need to know what you're doing in the first place. We're not certainly saving lives here, but it's like a doctor who goes straight to the surgery room because "it's a practical profession" anyway. You're pointing your finger at the wrong enemy.

The real issue is not theory in general in game design but fuzzy theoretical concepts with real concrete applications. A good theory immediately translates to practice, making them one whole.

Ignoring analytical game design means ignoring the future.

Technology will continue making things easier and faster to do. This will get even truer with AI (Artificial Intelligence).

If you want to thrive in an environment like that (I'm sure you do!), you cannot simply do what has been done so far. Each minute you waste looking for some shortcut or "magic tip" to design a game, you'll never get it back. It's lost as all the real learning opportunities you've thrown away out of the window with it.

Being just a game designer is not enough anymore.

You must turn yourself as quickly as possible into an Analytical Game Designer.

Your goal should be to start thinking like a professional. I like to use the term "engineer of ideas".

Remember all the traits I showed in this post and build towards them.

Learn, piece by piece, to work with an analytical mindset so you can:

• Turn an initial idea into gameplay by expanding its structure through iteration.
• Always work with a Game Direction in mind and avoid moving on through gut feelings and intuition.
• Develop an X-ray sight to analyze any gameplay feature and understand its workings.
• Know the core elements of gameplay down to the details so you can manage any game (no matter the genre).

A professional like this has a serious edge over others who are passionate players who dabble randomly.

You know what you're doing and how to think critically about games. This means you have control over your process and can really solve hard design problems.

The more you study, practice, and work with this mindset, the sooner you'll see yourself as an Analytical Game Designer.