What is Game Design Skills?

Gamedesignskills.com is a growing game development knowledge base and community specializing in sharing knowledge on game design concepts, craft, and profession with a deep focus on how the players control and interact with the game world, including gameplay mechanics, systems, and balancing.

Our mission is to help support the upcoming game designers and developers through the rough stages of learning their craft by sharing the hard lessons accumulated by professional game devs who had to discover and build through years of trials and errors.

If this is your first time visiting, please start here.

To make sure all the insights and perspectives are credible, all knowledge is shared by active practitioners with corresponding first-hand professional experience and insights either through guest author contributions and expert interviews.

If you’re an established professional interested in sharing your knowledge, contact us here.

Who am I? Why did I start this?

↑ This is me, signing World of Warcraft game boxes during the Mists of Pandaria expansion pack launch.

I’m Alexander Brazie, a game designer who has been blessed by the feedback of a million strangers, a thousand friends and a few great mentors, whose knowledge I want to pass on.

There’s a flood of information now, some of it credible and much of it speculative by people who haven’t done the work, particularly on Youtube. Furthermore, many studios are still just grinding directionless iteration cycles without understanding the guiding principles that can make their games great.

I believe that the knowledge of how to create strong gameplay is a part of the craft that should be shared.

I believe in putting the player’s experience first because, ultimately, when the players are satisfied:

1. They will be happy with the exchange of value and support you.
2. As a result, the studio will retain and sustainably profit.
3. At the same time, the team is fulfilled for having delivered their vision in its best form.

(I’ve witnessed many instances of established studios losing their loyal player base by prioritizing short-term monetization goals over the gameplay experience.)

As AI technology matures, design will continue to be essential in guiding the vision of the product, no matter the tools used.

Most importantly, I believe the best gaming experiences are yet to be created.

For the above reasons, I want to create a place where my colleagues and I can share the useful and practical lessons of the game design craft distilled from the past design challenges we’ve worked on.

And if you’re wondering about my game design background, below are a few things I’ve done:

Studios and game titles

(These are the ones I can legally disclose)

Triple A:

• Riot Games:
  • Worked on League of Legends
  • Trained Junior developers with my methodology and post-mortems.
• Blizzard Entertainment:
  • World of Warcraft, for expansions:
    • Naxxramas (Classic)
    • Burning Crusade
    • Wrath of the Lich King
    • Cataclysm
    • Mist of Pandaria
  • Provided design feedback during prototyping and development for
    • Starcraft 2
    • Diablo 3
    • Overwatch

Indie:

• Studio Pixanoh: Train designers and helping shape combat for upcoming title.
• Moon Studios (Microsoft): Ori and The Will of The Wisps
• Snackpass: Creative Director on the Tochi project

Game design keynotes

• Tencent Studio
• USC (University of Southern California)
• RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology)
• US AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association)
• UFIEA (University of Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy)
• West Gaming Foundation
• Kyoto Computer Gakuin – Kyoto, Japan