Game Design Curriculum

Game design (whether computer or even board games) is a valuable topic to learn even if you never make a real game. If you make any kind of <i>thing</i> that people use, learning a little about how to think like a game designer can help you make things that are more rewarding and pleasant to use.<p>One way to think of videogames is that they are <i>useless software</i>. Imagine a word processor that couldn&#x27;t save or print files. Or a compiler that didn&#x27;t generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone ever use such a pointless thing?<p>Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don&#x27;t really touch any part of the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They&#x27;re self contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can&#x27;t get anything tangible in return? It&#x27;s because the process of using the software itself—playing the game—is so <i>intrinsically</i> enjoyable.<p>If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that <i>does</i> do something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted fanbases.

(Riot&#x27;s less than stellar history aside) I see these takes on game design a lot, and they&#x27;re interesting to see because everyone takes their own stance on how to construct a fun game from distinct smaller concepts. Yahtzee’s Dev Diary [0] talks a lot about loops (And I give it a watch recommendation), while at your average GDC talk you hear about the concept of pillars [1] and their role in shaping games. I&#x27;m interested to hear if anyone else has resources on other game design takes.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CbArC2mvokQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CbArC2mvokQ</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kzQDVtysXjA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kzQDVtysXjA</a>

Despite thinking Riot has excellent insight into competitive game development, I&#x27;m pretty cynical about their recent wave of sharing since it wreaks of image repair. It doesn&#x27;t matter what there is to learn from Riot if the culture is poisonous, and I don&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s changed much since the last wave of allegations. It&#x27;s a shame, since this looks pretty substantive, but I&#x27;d rather learn this elsewhere.

They put a PowerPoint into a PDF into a scrollable window too small to display a full slide. Ouch.<p>The course itself is interesting, in that it&#x27;s not a programming course at all. It&#x27;s about what makes a game fun. Download the PDF and look at page 6, which has the useful info.

Disclaimer: I am a DotA fan&#x2F;nerd and am a huge fan of its design vs LoL&#x27;s.<p>I applaud Riot for this, but I think they&#x27;re specialty and reason for their huge growth is more to do with outreach, as jimbob45 noted. For a company with such a focus on competitive PvP games, I would argue they are not very good at balance at all. I would even go so far to say that their monetization scheme is detrimental to the balance of the game because of the incentive mismatch with creating a balanced game vs a profitable one. With that said, I think they have gotten a lot better over the years, and no one can take away from their success.

The thing that I take away from this is that this could be indicative of a shift away from the modern concept of university and towards a strengthening of the old master-apprentice models of learning.

I was genuinely interested in this, however, after clicking around I couldn&#x27;t find anything more than PDFs with empty areas for taking notes and vague curriculum module descriptions. Am I missing something? Perhaps there&#x27;s missing content when viewing the page via mobile. Will revisit from my PC later.

The “8 kinds of fun” have been a huge help to me as a D&amp;D DM. It’s a great framework for running adventures that players will respond to and give everyone a chance to find their fun.<p>It also helps answer micro, nuts and bolts like what kinds of rewards your players will respond to. For example, a player really into challenge might only care about the stats on a magic sword they find, but a player more into narrative or exploration will dig a sword with a mysterious engraving on the hilt even if it isn’t necessarily an upgrade. Real life people usually respond to multiple categories, but if you pay attention during the game you <i>will</i> see this at work.<p>I got onto this via a post at theangrygm.com, who I really recommend. He’s super opinionated, and the “angry GM” schtick gets old, but he knows what he’s talking about.

IMHO the biggest innovation Riot brought to the industry was player outreach. They were the first to heavily (30+ posts per day across multiple devs) interact with their player base. Even better, their patch notes were the first to have paragraphs explaining each change. Even <i>better</i>, they stuck to a bi-weekly patch cycle religiously, unlike Blizzard, who had to be begged to put out a patch every six months.<p>To players who actually played SC2 and LoL circa 2011, it wasn’t a surprise when LoL became the premiere e-sport and SC2 withered away.

Of all the non-FAANG gaming companies Riot is the one that most closely operates like a tech giant to me (with the exception of maybe Epic Games)<p>They have an incredibly robust M&amp;A division, have mastered land + expand with their esports, are putting down roots in pretty much every major gaming category, and have modern monetization practices down to a tee.<p>Excluding the clearly egregious cultural issues, I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term

I must say that they&#x27;re probably the most competent studio on the market<p>LoL is probably the only game that I play (maybe once a year I decide to spend up to 50h over some peroid on one title like GTA V or something) for years and it almost always feels &quot;fresh&quot; and very competitive.

Their MMR system has changed over the years to maximize revenue at the expense of player pain. They force the above-average player to play 100s of games climb to rank where they &quot;belong&quot; per season, gradually increasing the amount of time required to be absolutely absurd. Combine that with their lack of care for the toxicity in their player base and you have one hot stinky mess, and I wouldn&#x27;t put a high schooler anywhere near their core game design values. Direct reflection of their (bad) company culture.<p>In the micro, fun and well designed gameplay (Valorant too!). In the macro, their games are a terrible slog rooted in addiction science. All to maximize revenue from rolling skin and champion releases. Every single champion is released overpowered to add a temporary boost in play time and revenue. We can do better.

Riot Games, isn&#x27;t that the game company wholly owned by TenCent?

Is there any good game design curriculum you&#x27;d recommend? The webpage above is not suitable for self-paced learners...

Bad joke sorry

The problem I have with courses like this is it validates careers that lack integrity.<p>Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics.<p>The same with software development. Unfortunately, we as an industry validated an entire class of people with jobs where they literally manage software (agile people) without building actual software for years.<p>It doesn’t sit well with me, but life is not fair.