What I think is meant by game play, is that the interaction between the user playing the game and what’s actually going on, on-screen. One of things I think about is how the game designer wants a game to look and eventually play in a certain way. Whereas the consumer who actually buys the game wants it to play a certain way but also eventually wants it to look good. I believe that a game and the way it plays and pans out, is not quite directly down to the game designer but down more to the Art used to create it. When I think about it, I feel like whatever is created by an artist must then be passed down to the animators to then function it properly within the game it’s self and to what the game designer(s) have suggested. I think that the Artist have one of the biggest jobs alongside the programmers simply because everything you see in the game is down to how they have created it and made it look. Of course the game designer will plan out first what they exactly want but then the Artist sort of have to give life to what the designer asks for which is then followed by what the animator does with the game ready Art and then eventually the programmers will program them into the game to be fully compatible to the design brief they will have. I personally like nice free flowing game play that’s not stiff to control, in recent years game play in just about all games has become a lot better, this will be down to the way how things have become better over time and the technology, but another thing could be to make a new game or more particularly a sequel, they have to scrap the old ideas from before and make a completely different game engine for it to run on else it would be just the same game. Could be getting off topic, but generally it’s the interaction of how one plays the game, which then can be defined good or bad by many people with their own views of it.
In recent years, I found out how big the Artist actually is in gaming, they even make more money than the actual game designers themselves (on average). The game designers I think are the one who just sort of say “I want this and this and that, now your an Artist/Animator/Programmer etc now go do it!” to be honest I don’t think they have as bigger role as the others working on the game simply because the others actually put in the time and effort to create what is been asked for which is a hell of a lot of work considering that they must work to tight deadlines constantly etc. I think the Artists are possibly the most important just as an opinion because I feel that without them they would be no Art design for any game, no feel, nothing to make sound, nothing to animate, nothing to program and especially no game at all. But I do feel like the animators, programmers and even the musicians are equally as important.
Not just one game designer but a few or even more the merrier game designers working on a team would be beneficial. Simply because their job is to come up with ideas for the game, simply put the more designers, the more ideas, the better the game will be. It isn’t all down to just one person, although in the past it probably started off that way with places in the games industry being very limited at one point when it was a fairly new thing. Developers in games have to have a good if not excellent understanding of gaming if they are to help develop them. If you’re given a task, you have to complete that task to specific standards that are required but at the same time you’ve really got to think about what you’re doing and stand back from it for a moment and look at what you’re achieving and ask “is it working?” “What’s wrong with it?” and “what’s right with it?” What I’m saying is that game design has to be a part of everyone working in industry because without it there’s not much purpose of making a game, you’d just keep being told what to do and completing it day in, day out and moving on to the next thing without even thinking about what you’ve achieved. Game design puts together all the elements of a game in a sort of mind map and links them all together as one, so I think where game design comes from in a developer is how they interoperate what they are doing and how that fits in with everything else.
What’s important to me when I play a game can vary all the time. Sometimes I end up buying games and playing them just simply because of the title of it. I quite rarely buy new games now-a-days, but when I do what’s important is not the title but the style of the game. What I mean by that is what kind of game is it? How does it play? Will I be playing it over and over again? Is it smooth in terms of graphics and animation? And finally sometimes it can be generally the title of it. Different types of games operate in very different ways, in example a sports game will play completely differently from an adventure game, so for a sports game I would like it to be quite fluent and the aim of the game to be quite similar to that of real world sport. Whereas in an adventure game I would like it to be quite straight forward with tasks and objectives to complete, fluent also but the aim of the game to be more of a fantasy world type situation you are in, I think mainly this is because sometime you just want to get away from the real world things within games, else we might as well go outside and have crazy adventures and play sports for real instead of being lazy and sitting down to play it on a TV screen. I like quite a lot of different genres, like RPG, adventure, sport, action etc but one thing I’d say about them is that they have slightly different goals, what makes a good game to me is trying to incorporate as many different factors into the game as possible, for example every game has its goal but try to expand it a bit, not meaning have as many goals as possible because it would be too tedious not just for creating but to the person plying it as well but having some sort of variation to make it interesting. If you are designing a role playing game then It’s going to be more about a story line and the many possibilities that can happen with the limits of the game, whereas if you were designing a sports game the object is very simple every time you play (to win the game) and it would be more about the aesthetic approach to it rather than story because it doesn’t really require a story at all. It’s like comparing an adventure game to a puzzle, the story is vital in the adventure but the strategy to challenge the player is more important to the designer and to you as a player.
So to sum up, when I play a game it has to look and do exactly what it says on the box. Over the years gaming has evolved from the simple 8 bit designs were hardly any artists but many programmers with a great knowledge of science to make a game work, however now it’s more of a different story as you can now gain a degree in game design to allow you to get into industry, meaning there’s a lot more creativity and inspiration rather than knowing how something works and not have a good knowledge of making stories etc, when now you look at game now-a-days with their fancy new graphics, music and animation, back in the days of Pong it was as simple as two sticks bouncing a pixel ball back to each other until one misses and there wasn’t really any need for an artist/animator/musician, now there’s a million and one reasons to have them and that’s because game design and the elements of it have evolved over time. It’s gone from knowing how to make simple things on complicated hardware and software (at the time) to now knowing the hard and software inside out and really opening up the possibilities of what we can do. It requires a lot more thinking and skills such as drawing, knowledge of 3D software and good storyline making etc.
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