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Welcome to the second course in the Game Design and
Development Specialization here on Coursera.
Again I'm Casey O'Donnell, one of your instructors,
I'm from Michigan State University in the Department of Media and Information.
In this video, I'm just gonna give you a little bit of an introduction
into the kinds of things and the kinds of materials that you'll get exposed to and
the principles of game design.
So as Brian Winn already mentioned in the first course, making games is hard fun.
But I'm gonna let you in on a secret.
Game design is the best part.
But that's also why we started with an introduction to game development.
Because in some ways you can kind of think about
game development as the skeleton of your game.
So now we need to talk about the beating heart of your game.
Game design is the circulatory system, it's the passion,
it's the core part of a game.
Having an idea is easy.
Having good ideas is hard.
But it's not as hard as taking a good idea and making it a reality, putting something
out into the world, and so we start with game development in some ways so
that you begin to cultivate those skills of not just having good ideas, but
trying to build them, trying to put them out into reality.
So, just a little bit about how we kind of sequenced the course, and
why we're doing it that way.
We're gonna start with the design process, to give you a sense of what it looks like,
how that process works, the order of operations.
Because believe it or not, there actually is a process kind of,
I mean it's a creative process so that means you end up circling back and
doing some iteration, but that's important to know.
We're also gonna talk about generating game ideas like where do good
ideas come from?
How do you generate worlds?
How do you tell stories?
Because some games tell stories.
Not all games tell stories, but all games have messages.
We're gonna talk about the difference between designing game play, and
designing levels, and then how you balance game designs.
How you balance game levels.
What do I mean by balancing?
Well, you don't want it to be too hard, or too easy.
Not fun.
Those are important things.
We're gonna talk about prototyping.
How you are able to iterate on a design idea.
We're gonna talk about play testing because, believe it or not, getting your
game in front of people is probably gonna be one of the most important things.
It's gonna teach you things about your game.
That's also why we've partnered with Kongregate.
Because Kongregate is a community where you can put your game
out in front of people and get very real feedback.
Hopefully you'll get some of that feedback here on the platform from your
peers as well.
We're also gonna talk about user experience and what that is, and
how you design for a user experience.
And I also wanna talk about social issues in design, because believe it or
not, as designers we make things and we put them out in the world and,
turns out that there's, I think, some social responsibility around that as well.
So, we're gonna talk about all these things in this course.
I hope it sounds really interesting.
I hope that you've started with Introduction to Game Development, so
you've got a hint, and some skills, and ability to actually work
with making games, so that we can take these ideas that you generate here, and
make some really cool stuff.
Real quick, what's coming up next?
We're gonna talk about the design process.
I know, design, process, sounds a little bit boring.
But, it's just to give you some insight into, hey, how are we gonna do this?
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