Video Game Designer roadmap

Stage 1 of 3 · about 12 weeks

Foundations

Understand why games are fun, and build your first tiny playable games using a free engine.

1. 1

   Core game design theory

   Every design choice answers a question: what does the player do, and why do they want to do it again? The core loop, challenge and reward, and player motivation are the vocabulary you will use in every design review.

2. 2

   Prototyping in a free engine

   A design you cannot play is only an opinion. A prototype lets you test an idea in hours. Unity and Godot are both free and widely used; Unity uses C#, which appears in the job data.

3. 3

   Basic scripting

   Designers who can script test their own ideas without waiting for a programmer. You do not need to be an expert, just able to read code, change values, and build simple logic like if the player touches X, do Y.

4. 4

   Design documentation

   Writing is a core task of the job. A clear one-page design doc lets artists, programmers, and producers build what you imagined instead of what they guessed.

5. 5

   Playtesting and listening

   Active listening is the top skill in the data. Players will not tell you what to fix, but watching them will. You learn to observe silently and separate what they did from what they say.

Then 2 more stages (about 72 weeks in all) with lessons, drills, projects, 6 interview questions with strong answers and free resources.