Plaidophile

Becky Burke asks,

I am very interested in learning more about video game designers. I am a Substitute Teacher who has met students who are "highly" interested and passionate about wanting to know how one educates themselves on how to design video games. I glanced through your ideas and think they are terrific. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

My (probably ill-informed) response follows.

I'm not really sure how I can help you, really. I'm not a pro game designer by any stretch of the imagination, and the subject of "how to design video games" is a pretty big one. :) You might want to have those kids check out flipcode.com or look for some free/cheap "game programming system" online.

Actually, something which might work well for them is Macromedia Flash. If you don't know what it is, it's a programming language designed for interactive graphics things and seems to be very good for games (judging by the number of games written in it). I think the educational version is around $100.

I think the questions that need to be asked in order are this:

• What do we want to do?
• Will it be fun?
• How do we do it?
• Who should do what? (the main tasks are typically graphics, sound, level design, and game logic; that last one is probably going to be the hardest for the kids to do)
• Can we *really* do this with our time and talent? What should we scale back on?

And then just go from there. :)

(If anyone else in the audience would like to give her more advice, you can find her email address on her original comment. Feel free to double-post it here too, though.)