Game Design - Combining Interests - Shadow Urtheart

This tutorial will show you how you can combine your general interests with game design jobs to increase your prospects of getting into university courses and applying for jobs.

Although there are a fair few jobs and courses available for people wanting to get into the games industry, far too many people believe it to be a walk in the park when it takes more than just a knowledge of how to make a game to get employers to notice you above the rest of the crowd. In this tutorial, we will be showing you how to use some of the interests you might have to better your chances of getting into a Computer Games Design course and getting a job in gaming.

One of the most obvious things that can help you during a course is a good ability to draw. This doesn’t mean you need to be able to draw masterpieces with your hands, however a basic knowledge of sketching is always useful. This becomes much more important for concept artists, and as such anyone looking into this area should really hone their art skills and look into perfecting realistic sketching, as well as other art styles such as anime or abstract to broaden their perspective and give them a better chance against competitors.

Other artistic styles such as music are also great ways of broadening your knowledge, but as well as an understanding, compositions are an excellent way of showing your creative flair, which is a very important ability to have in this area of work. This can be particularly beneficial to animators, as the understanding of timing and rhythm can be very an important skill to animators looking to make animations in time with music, something which has increased in popularity though the years of gaming.

It is also a skill Concept Designers can work with, as it is something which should be considered by them at the later stages of pre-production.

Another skill which is important within the industry is script writing. Concept Designers are almost always required to have this skill as the script for cut scenes is required early in the pre-production stage.

This skill is also important for character, environment and plot design, as this needs to be written out in full as a base for all the other production and pre-production members to use when they continue on the work in creating these characters.

Although a course in script writing isn’t required a good base in English is required for these skills, as well as an understanding as to how these items should be presented.

The most overlooked skill and one which is most useful is maths. This skill is an advantage in any involvement of 3D applications or animation as it helps to calculate things to real world statistics, allowing things to be modelled and animated correctly, while Texture Artists will benefit from the ability to create texture maps which make the most use of space while keeping everything correctly mapped on the character.

While no advance maths skills are required, a basic knowledge of multiplication and division, angles and some trigonometry will benefit anyone wishing to go into the industry.