Understand Games Before Joining A Game Design Team

{To read the first part of this post, go to How To Start Creating Games}

One mistake a lot of begginers do when they’re just starting with game design is that they try to immediately team up with some friends or with people in the internet to create games when they never created or even tried creating one themselves. It is much more likely for you to end up failing if you have no previous experience doing your job and try to team up with some people.

Even if you’re not a programmer, being able to code is a great skill to have because you’ll know how to better optimize for your game. For example, if you’re a sprite artist creating a 2D game with a programmer and you have previous programming experience, you might know the sizes which are most hardware and memory friendly and you’ll make sprites of those sizes which will consume much less memory in the game thus you’ll be able to create that really cool boss art you wanted to implement so badly in the game!

Examples like these can be found for any position in game designing. The better you understand what everyone’s job in the game design process is, the better you will be able to help them and consequently the better the game will turn out to be.

On the other hand, not having previous knowledge could cause you to spend countless hours creating some artwork and when you give it to your programmer, he just straight up tells you that there’s no way to implement in the game. After all that work, the best place it could end up is in your portfolio.

Not joining a team doesn’t mean that you never get help from anyone else or never create a game with someone else though. When getting help from other game designers you can learn the techniques which they use to solve the problem you had to tackle. Just because you start creating games on your own doesn’t mean that you can’t ever partner with a friend of your to create a game together. Creating a small project with a friend can teach you a lot about teamwork, managing tasks and deadlines, how slightly bigger project work, and many more lessons.

To read the third part of this post, go to Joining A Game Design Team.