You are a passionate gamer, and you think you know what Game Design is, but, trust me, you don’t.

Many people claim to know what Game Design is, but when forced to define it, they have a suspicious hard time clearly explaining it. It’s not enough to play tons of games to understand what Game Design is really about. And sometimes, it’s not even enough to design a game since many experienced Game Designers struggle to describe their work. Defining Game Design in a few short paragraphs leaves aside too many essential details for an Aspiring Game Designer and gives you the illusion of understanding. We don’t want that, so in this article, you’ll have the complete and ultimate explanation of everything you need to know about Game Design as a field of study.

If you want to study and learn Game Design, this is a must-read.

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By this end of this article you’ll learn:

• What is Game Design
• How Game Design fits into Game Development
• The 6 Game Design branches

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

What Is Game Design

Game Design is a branch of Game Development that aims to structure every aspect of a Game Experience.

Doing Game Design means inventing, defining, and describing every element of a Game Experience and its interactions with other elements. Every bit of what you see, hear, and feel when playing a game is a designer's decision to achieve a specific experience. Game Design lives inside the broader topic of Game Development, which groups together all the roles needed to create a game (design, programming, art, sound, testing, etc.).

Game Design also has great responsibilities, especially in other Game Dev roles.

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Game Design is the base ground upon which every other department work.

Every department in charge of every other game aspect (art, sound, programming, etc.) work based on how Game Design defines the game elements. If you picture a game like a house, Game Design is the blueprint that dictates how that house needs to be built.

Let's give some examples. Artists don't make up a character's aesthetic out of thin air; they must work based on what that character does and his narrative context. A Game level has a certain mood and sound management because it creates a specific experience thoroughly defined by Game Design.

Game Design defines how the game is played, shaping the player's final experience.

To further clarify what Game Design is, let's see what Game Design is not.

What Game Design Is Not

Due to its fuzziness, some people mistake Game Design for many things.

If we throw the term Game Design into the general public and analyze the reactions, we discover it’s a pretty abstract concept. So trying to align it with already established study fields and jobs is fairly common. But I want to wipe your confusion out of existence about Game Design forever.

So here’s a list of everything you might mistake Game Design for.

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Game Design is NOT about:

• Writing stories (that’s the Writer)
• Directing the team (that’s the Game Director)
• Drawing (that’s the Artist)
• Modeling (that’s the 3D Artist)
• Coding the game (that’s the Programmer)
• Generate ideas (that’s everyone on the team)

If you have other roles that confuse you, email us so we can add them.

However, there’s a concept to remember about this list, and that’s where the popular confusion may come from.

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All these things are not Game Design, but they could be useful for improving the Game Designer's skillset.

What Game Design is and what a Game Designer does are 2 different things. Game Design is always tight to culture, and every knowledge element could be helpful to improve the Game Designer's skillset.

This pictures a Game Designer as a "weird fluid role", and although you should know what a Game Designer is by now, it can indeed be very fluid. He's not an Artist, but he may need his skills; he's not a Writer, but he may need his skills; he's not a Programmer, but he may need his skills, etc. You get the idea.

Ok, now let's dig into the rabbit hole and address one of the most common forms of confusion about what Game Design is.

What’s The Difference Between Game Design And Game Programming

Game Design is about defining the structure of the Game Experience.

As we've said, Game Design is like a blueprint. It's more about defining game elements' structure, behavior, and interactions rather than creating them.

So doing Game Design means:

• Defining what the player can do in the game
• How enemies will react to what the player does
• How the game levels are structured
• What information the player needs at any time
• How the player progresses through the game
• How the narrative content is delivered
• etc.

These are just a glimpse of what a Game Designer does; they all need a lot of work.

Game Design is a fundamental role, but it's not enough. After all, the game must be made somehow, and the team needs a way to make those design decisions concrete.

That's when Game Programming comes in.

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Game Programming is about writing the code that brings that Game Experience to life.

Game Programming is another branch of Game Development and is about structuring and writing the code to build the final game. It’s not the Game Programmer’s job to invent things (it can, and should, propose ideas though) but to implement them inside a Game Engine. All the programming work is based on what Game Design has defined and described. So basically, a Game Designer produces a bunch of documents that describe a feature, and a Game Programmer uses those documents to code that feature.

Remember that they don’t work in 2 different universes, but they’re always closely related.

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The 2 roles are constantly communicating to create the best game experience possible.

Communication is crucial for every role and sits at the heart of any good-performing team. This is especially true when it comes to Game Design and Game Programming. If they work in 2 separate bunkers, the game is doomed to be a mess, and the experience will hugely suffer from it. The communication between Designers and Programmers must be constant to reduce misunderstanding and better grasp each other way of working.

Let’s now take the final step by addressing the last concern about what Game Design really is.

Is Game Design More On Technical Or Creative Side?

Game Design is a technical discipline with creative purposes.

Game Design is about knowing how a game works and how players interact with it. To do this, it uses many technical tools (Documents, Flowcharts, Spreadsheets, etc.) that Game Designers leverage to manipulate game elements, make decisions and structure the target experience. But Game Design is also about creating a meaningful experience that the player will live. To do this, Game Designers must engage in creative endeavors and inject meaning into the game to express themselves through it.

Game Design has an art core inside a technical shell.

Some people tend to bring Game Design closer to Science, but that’s a half-baked mistake.

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Game Design is not Science, but it uses some science-based concepts and principles.

Game Design doesn't come out of a laboratory experiment, and neither are its effects precisely measurable. However, it makes use of scientific-based concepts and methods.

Game Design is a discipline with a series of models, tools, and methodologies that Game Designers use to create better games. So, despite being often based on scientific facts, these models are not magic or objective truths. They are representations of the game's structure we can use to create better experiences.

As a famous quote said: "All models are wrong, but some are useful".

Now you should have a clear grasp of what Game Design is, so we can look at how it fits into his broader topic.

Game Design is a branch of Game Development that aims at inventing, defining, and describing every element of a Game Experience and all its interactions. Its work is the base ground for other departments. It’s the blueprint that shows how to build the house.

How Game Design Fits Into Game Development

There are 4 Phases in Game Development.

• Concept Phase: defining the overall game experience.
• Pre-Production Phase: defining every detail of the game.
• Production Phase: implement what’s been defined in Pre-Production.
• Post-Production Phase: monitor the game after release and develop expansions.

Every game is a different universe, but these phases are always the same.

So let’s see where Game Design takes place.

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Game Design is greatly involved in the Concept and Pre-Production Phases.

As we've said in previous chapters, Game Design is the game's base, so it makes sense to involve it right from the start. In fact, Game Designers work for the most part in the Concept and Pre-Production Phases. Of course, the whole team is involved here, but Game Designers are doing most of the work to flash out all the game details that will be implemented in Production.

But let's dive a little deeper into each Phase.

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In the Concept Phase, Game Design is about the overall Game Experience.

Game Design is a sort of "reverse engineering work". You define your target experience and create the best game you can that generates that experience.

During the Concept Phase, Game Design is about creating an overall description of the target experience. In essence, this phase's goal is to develop a Game Direction that will be the lighting guide in all the other phases. So Game Designers define the Themes and the Messages, the Game Pillars, the Core Gameplay, the Narrative Context, etc.

During this phase, the design team is busy, but that's in Pre-Production that the hard work comes in.

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In the Pre-Production Phase, Game Design is about mapping out every detail.

Now that the direction is clear, the team must set sail and start the actual journey. The Pre-Production is the most crucial phase since it’s when game elements are laid out and defined in every detail. Game Design here is 100% Iteration Cycle to understand how the game works and improve every feature over time. If the Pre-Production is poorly managed or rushed, the game and the team can suffer tremendously during Production.

Concept and Pre-Production are where Game Design rules, but it can’t go home yet.

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In the rest of the development phases, Game Design is much more about checking and fixing.

During Production, Game Design significantly reduces its work, but it never disappears. Production is the phase of mainly Programmers and 2D/3D Artists that needs to create the game that will be released.

Game Design here is about hard testing the game and ensuring everything goes as planned. But, since things never go exactly as expected, Designers must react to problems and fix issues balancing deadlines and target experience. Same for the Post-Production Phase, but the work may increase in case the team decides to create a game expansion.

Ok, now that you know the role of Game Design in the development cycle, let’s close this blog post by looking at the Game Design branches.

Game Design dominates the Concept and Pre-Production Phases, which are about describing a Game Target Experience and then defining the specific game structure that generates it.

The 6 Game Design Branches

Game Design is broader than you might think.

Game Design on its own means nothing more than a vast field of study like Chemistry, Medicine, Physics, Literature, Philosophy, etc. The comparison with those I listed might seem “awkward” at first, but it’s not; Game Design is a huge field. And I’ll prove it to you in a moment.

Game Design has 6 branches:

• Gameplay Design
• Level Design
• System Design
• Narrative Design
• User Interface Design
• User Experience Design

If you think you want to master them all, you will be disappointed since I don’t think you will live that long in this world.

Before diving deep into them, remember that the roles you see in job applications are a different thing.

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These branches are fields of study that often don't align with company roles.

What a Gameplay Designer or a System Designer does varies a lot depending on the company you're looking at. Still, the nature of Gameplay Design remains the same.

"Gameplay Designer" is just a name of a role for job application understanding. Companies don't align with formal fields of study, and they don't have to. A game development team may have specific needs to fulfill due to the game's project management structure or scale.

Take, for example, the term "Combat Designer". Combat is a Gameplay Design work, but if you need to make a game with a complex combat system, you may want someone specifically for that, so you can call it Combat Designer.

So, without further ado, let's dive right into each branch one by one.

1. Gameplay Design

Gameplay Design is about defining all the game elements and behaviors.

Gameplay Design is the reign of Game Mechanics, Game Dynamics, Rules, and Gameplay Situations. If you picture a game like a house, doing Gameplay Design means defining all the bricks and how they interact with each other.

Take for example:

• Shooting an enemy.
• Moving in an environment.
• Jumping a hole in the ground.
• Block an enemy attack with a shield.
• Pushing and pulling objects.
• Etc.

However, no bricks are created equal because the player is the most important brick of all.

And Gameplay Design needs to define all the possible actions the player can perform along with their interactions.

Gameplay Design is one of the most challenging (and little understood) Game Design branches, but it’s the most important one for a specific reason.

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Gameplay is the base of the entire game’s design.

A game without gameplay is not a game. Gameplay is the basis on which every other Game Design branch works. It’s a primordial soup of elements, interactions, and interesting situations that other branches must leverage to lay out a full-blown experience.

When you have some gameplay elements, you need a way to put them somewhere, and that’s where Level Design comes in.

2. Level Design

Level Design is about creating game levels and managing interactive space.

Level Design aims to define the structure (dimensions and distances) and the content of a game level. Some examples could be enemy position, type and number in certain zones, the layout of an area, how areas are connected, etc. Level Design work is crucial because it’s when the target experience comes to life for the first time in a concrete form.

As you can imagine, Level Design cannot work on its own since it depends on what the player can do.

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Level Design uses the mechanics, rules, and dynamics defined by Gameplay Design to create interactable environments.

You cannot place game elements in a level if you don’t have those elements in the first place. That’s why Level Design is not concerned with creating new behaviors, rules, or mechanics. It uses the complete set of possibilities defined by Gameplay Design to lay out an interactable environment by leveraging those possibilities as much as possible.

If you take, for example, an enemy character, Gameplay Design defines the rules that govern its behavior. And Level Design defines the area in which the enemy will be placed and the layout of that area itself.

Gameplay inside an interactable environment makes a good game’s skeleton.

However, the game needs to be refined to focus on the target experience, and that’s where System Design does its job.

3. System Design

System Design is about defining how all the Game Systems behave and interact.

First of all, what's a Game System? It's just a group of mechanics, dynamics, and rules in the same context (combat system, movement system, weather system, etc.). The most common misunderstanding about System Design is that it's about creating Game Systems. It's not because Gameplay Design does it. Instead, System Design uses mathematical and statistical models (along with a ton of testing) to define how a Game System behaves and interacts with other systems.

It's crucial to remember that System Design doesn't invent anything new in the game.

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System Design balances and manages all the game systems that Level and Gameplay Design put in place.

A reasonable simplification of what System Design does is balancing. Balancing something means managing a game element's value over time to make the game generate the target experience.

Take, for example, the element system in "Zelda Breath of The Wild". When Link uses lightning arrows on a paddle, 2 systems interact (Character Combat System and Elemental System). Defining the 2 systems and their behavior is about Gameplay Design. Placing them in the world is about Level Design. And defining how it behaves in every situation (amount of electrical damage, range, duration, etc.) is about System Design.

We have a good chunk of the game with Gameplay, Level, and System, but it's far from complete.

So let's now add something that is not necessary to define a game as such but make everything more powerful: Context.

4. Narrative Design

Narrative Design is about defining the narrative structure of the Game Experience.

The first mistake people make when hearing about Narrative Design is confining it to Creative Writing. Don’t get me wrong. It can also be about the story and worldbuilding, but often, a professional writer could do it. Doing Narrative Design means, among other things, choosing the story structure, keeping narrative and gameplay consistent, defining how the story is delivered (for example, cutscenes, in-game dialogues, environmental storytelling), etc.

Narrative content is not just a separate layer sitting on top of the game.

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Narrative Design adds a new dimension to the Game Experience through context.

Context in a game is critical because it can dramatically change the meaning of the gameplay and level design. What a player does in a specific context is different if translated in another context. So Narrative Design must always be linked and consistent with every other design branch to create a meaningful game experience.

Creating meaning without context is nearly impossible since the player cannot feel the implication of his actions. And this greatly diminishes the game experience power.

So we have a game inside a context, but the player usually needs more information to interact with our set of rules.

User Interface Design exists to fix precisely that.

5. User Interface (UI) Design

UI Design is about defining the look and behavior of Game Interfaces.

A Game Interface is exactly what you’re thinking of. Timers, ammo counters, health bars, inventory screen, main menu, pause menu, options menu, etc.

Doing UI Design means defining those interface elements, their aesthetic constraints (for UI Artists), and their behavior in the game. Most interfaces are not strictly part of the game because they don’t directly interfere with other elements. They just represent something for the player.

Nonetheless, they are an essential part of the player experience.

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UI Design is concerned with what information the player needs at a specific moment.

The player needs some information during play, such as the ammo left, the character level and stats, what’s inside the inventory, etc. UI Design controls and manages the information flow from the game to the player. Without proper interfaces, the player would have to derive these information from the game itself, so most would remain invisible.

If you want to appreciate the importance of UI Design, take a screenshot of a game and look at it after removing any UI element. It could be difficult to understand what’s going on in many games.

We are at a pretty good point with the game, but we’re not done yet because we cannot leave the player feeling of interaction by chance.

That’s where User Experience Design comes in.

6. User Experience (UX) Design

UX Design is about defining usability, feedback, and ease and pleasure of game interaction.

I’m sure you can relate to the good feeling of deflecting in Sekiro, jumping in Super Mario 64, steering wheels in Gran Turismo, shooting in Doom, etc. These are all examples of great Game Feel, which defines the pleasurable sensations of performing the game actions and is a crucial part of UX Design.

UX Design is also concerned with how a specific type of user (not player) interacts with the software. So inside this field of study, you’ll find usability regarding interfaces, feedback (visual, auditory, and haptic), accessibility for impaired users, etc. Furthermore, UX Design can drive information along with UI Design by using feedback so the player gets wind of something. For example, when a character hits something, you can see a VFX (Visual Effect) or an SFX (Sound Effect) playing.

All these areas seem different from one another, but they all share the same focus.

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UX Design focuses on the game's feel to increase player awareness and reduce frustration.

This field of study is strongly grounded in Psychology and Neuroscience. Doing UX Design means studying how human beings behave and think to leverage that knowledge to improve the game experience. So UX Design aims to reduce player frustration as much as possible so he can keep being immersed in the game. A game without UX Design would still work, but it would have a layer of useless and dangerous difficulty that will 100% ruin the player experience.

Ok, these are all the 6 Game Design Branches.

But before closing this article, I want to address a question you might have.

What About Sound Design?

Sound Design is not a Game Design branch, even if the name implies it.

I'm not here to discredit the work of Sound Designers, which are a fundamental part of the team and of the beauty of a game experience. The word "Design" is used whenever there's something to design (duh?!), but Game Design is specifically about designing game experiences.

What I'm saying is that Sound Design is not a branch of Game Design, but it's certainly a branch of Design as a whole. Sound Design is not concerned with making decisions about the game's sound. Instead, it's about finding or creating those sounds defined by, most of the time, UX Design. In fact, the Sound Design team is generally made of Foley Artists (record Sound Effects), Sound Engineers (manage sounds in code), and Composers (record soundtracks).

What is called a "Sound Designer" in reality is often a Foley Artist that needs to find or record anew the proper sound effect.

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Sound Design is about creating and managing the sound experience of the game.

Try to play any game muted, and you'll find that your experience will be dramatically different. This is why sound is so crucial; it evokes emotions, gives feedback to the player, increases the feeling of the player's actions, etc. The decision about having or not these things is a User Experience Design or a Game Direction concern. Sound Design is only about choosing the right sound like an artist draws the right artwork and a programmer codes the right feature.

Ok, we're done, but I want to point out one important thing before closing.

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This blog post is not about the Design Process.

I described the Game Design branches using examples that incrementally add game elements. Remember that this doesn't resemble the design process at all, and neither are the Game Design's role so tight with these branches. Designing a game is much more complicated than an assembly line of a factory where each step perfectly matches the next.

What Game Design is, it's not what a Game Designer does.

The Game Design field of study has 6 branches: Gameplay, Level, System, Narrative, User Interface, and User Experience. Each has different purposes, tools, and work methodology, but they all contribute to generating the Target Experience.