Overwhelmed by Game Design?
Use These Free Tools to Bring Your Vision to Life.
So, you’re ready to jump into the exciting world of game creation, but suddenly, you’re buried under a flood of tools and questions. Where do you even begin?
Do you start by mastering a game engine like Unity or Unreal?
Or should you explore AI tools that claim to simplify game development?
What about coding—if you go that route, which programming language should you choose?
And then there's the art—should you go for 2D or 3D, and which software should you use, Blender or Maya?
…Plus, don’t forget about UI design!
But hold on—before you get lost in this maze, remember your core task: ‘designing a game’.
Game design isn’t about production tools or techniques. It’s about having a clear vision and a plan. You can only truly digest game design by separating the concept of 'design' from 'production.'
🧪Design Process
Here are the steps to design your game using completely FREE tools, ensuring you stay on track and bring your vision to life.
1. Pen and Paper
When embarking on a design task, the most crucial tool at your disposal is often the simplest: pen and paper. Start by jotting down all your thoughts—don’t worry about how polished or presentable they are. At this stage, it’s all about capturing your ideas. Since you're the only one looking at them, there's no need to stress about perfection.
As you dive deeper into your ideas, take the time to clearly articulate your problem statements and the "whys" behind them. Doing this effectively will guide you toward discovering what makes for a truly good design.
Check out my thoughts about “good design” in this post
By writing, sketching, or doodling your ideas on paper, you'll start shaping your solutions and gain clarity on what you're aiming to achieve.
Bonus Tip: Use a Note-Taking App (I recommend Google Keep)
Inspiration can strike at any moment, and it's more likely you'll have your phone handy than pen and paper. That's why I recommend keeping a note-taking app on your phone to capture those ideas as soon as they come. From my experience, ideas that pop up at odd moments can easily slip away if you don't jot them down right away. It's better to trust your notes than rely solely on memory.
2. Documents
After you've captured your thoughts on paper and in notes, the next step is to organize them into a coherent structure. While the first stage is all about letting your creativity flow, this phase is about refining and documenting your ideas in a way that makes sense to you and can serve as a valuable resource as your project evolves. This organized documentation will not only help you stay focused but also provide clarity and direction when new collaborators join your project in the future.
Keep in mind, though, that this step is ongoing. Documentation isn't a one-time task; it's an evolving process. As a designer, it's your responsibility to keep these documents up-to-date with any changes or new ideas that arise after the initial documentation phase.
These documents are crucial, serving as a reference point for you and your entire team.
For a tool to manage this documentation, you don’t need anything fancy—Google Docs is simple, free, and gets the job done.
3. Spreadsheets
To complement and enhance your documentation, spreadsheets can be incredibly useful for organizing various aspects of your design. A free tool like Google Sheets is more than sufficient for this purpose.
Spreadsheets are ideal for managing complex elements of your design that might be challenging to convey in traditional documentation. For example, you can use them to track variables that affect the balance and difficulty of your game or to list interconnected features that rely on each other. Spreadsheets provide a clearer, more dynamic way to represent such intricate systems.
Pro Tip: Learn Google Sheets (or Microsoft Excel).
While you don't need to be a spreadsheet expert, having a solid grasp of these tools will be invaluable. A better understanding of spreadsheets can significantly boost your efficiency and effectiveness in managing your design.
4. Whiteboarding
Just as spreadsheets help you manage numerical data, whiteboarding is essential for addressing your visual needs. Whiteboarding allows you to map out your game’s journey, plot points, and user experience in a clear and organized way.
This method is excellent for visualizing the connections between different elements of your game. While you can achieve similar results with pen and paper, a whiteboarding tool enhances this process, making it more efficient and impactful.
I highly recommend incorporating whiteboarding into your design process to create more effective documentation. It’s much easier to convey complex concepts through shapes and connections rather than long blocks of text. For whiteboarding, I suggest using the free tool, Miro, which offers a versatile and user-friendly platform to support your designs.
5. Presentations
As you brainstorm, explore, and develop your design, it will likely evolve into a complex web of interconnected ideas. This is where presentations come in handy, helping you distill and communicate your vision to a broader audience. Google Slides is an excellent, free tool for this purpose.
Once you've settled on your design and vision, try breaking it down into a concise, pitch-deck-style presentation. Keep the number of slides and the level of detail to a minimum. This exercise forces you to think about your design from a new perspective, to make it easier to explain and share.
Present this pitch to a wider audience, especially those who haven’t been involved in the design process. This is your opportunity to test whether your ideas and solutions resonate with others. After all, one of the core skills of a game designer is the ability to effectively communicate their vision to everyone involved in bringing it to life.
🔭Prioritize Vision
Even if you’re not a coder or an artist, you can still be an effective game designer by focusing on these fundamental tools. The key is to spend your time developing a clear, well-thought-out design. The clearer your design, the easier the production phase will be.
Once your design is set, you can then explore and make informed decisions about which game engine to use, what kind of art style will best suit your vision, and how the UI should be structured. By having a solid design in place, these choices will no longer feel overwhelming; they will be guided by the clear vision you’ve established.
So, before diving headfirst into learning new software or mastering a coding language, take a step back and focus on the design. With a well-crafted design, the production process will follow naturally, and you’ll find yourself on a much smoother path to creating the game you’ve envisioned.
📜TL;DR
Focus on Game Design First: Prioritize the design process over production tools to ensure a clear vision and plan for your game.
Start with Simple Tools: Begin with pen and paper to capture your initial ideas and problem statements, emphasizing clarity and simplicity.
Document and Organize: Use tools like Google Docs and Google Sheets to structure and refine your ideas, keeping documentation up-to-date as your project evolves.
Visualize with Whiteboarding: Leverage whiteboarding tools like Miro to map out your game’s flow and visual connections, enhancing your documentation.
Present Your Vision: Create concise presentations to communicate your design to others, ensuring your ideas resonate with a broader audience.
Found this explainer useful? Think this strategy could work? Spread the word and dive into the discussion!
Also, don't forget to ask any questions you have about my profession—I’ll try and help answer them.