Every game has a design, from the monsters you fight, to the mechanics you use, to the levels you traverse. If you loved a boss fight from a video game, or vividly remember an experience you had playing a game, that's game design!

In the Design Department, we think about and analyze what makes games fun, enjoyable, and memorable. If you like coming up with and designing cool stuff for video games, welcome to Design!

What do we do?

We host weekly workshops that go over different design principles used in the process of building and making a game. We go into details about what could make a game fun, and how this element can be achieved in many different ways, ranging from something as broad as the concept of your game, to how the player moves.

Outside of our workshops, we offer counseling and advice for any design issues or questions that you may have. Additionally, we have sessions where we work together as a group and design a game from scratch.

Playtesting is also a very important aspect of design! If you want any advice for your game or need playtesters, ask us! We're happy to help!

What do we teach?

Our workshops are all centered around the design and concept of different video games. Specifically, we focus on:

We also analyze video games and incorporate the concepts we teach into our analyses. Analyzing what made a video game fun or memorable is important when thinking about what elements from that game made it enjoyable.

Industry Relevance

There are a lot of careers one can pursue if specializing in design. A few of these include:

Software and Tools

Here are some of the applications we use for work in the Design Department. Because game design is all about playtesting, we mainly use these tools and applications for playtesting what we design.