Game Design

When I started my research on Game Design at the University of Gloucestershire, UK, in 2009, a course with the same title was offered by both Art and Technical universities. In art schools they were focused only on the artistic parts of design of games. In technical universities, however, students had to do both artistic side including coming up with ideas, storyboarding, drawing, implementing their games environment/ characters and programing part of the game design. The challenges that students were faced with were in nature the challenges in the gaming industry; separate sides of art and technology with no common language between them. Adding to the difficulty was that students were admitted to the course in technical universities such as mine with no prerequisite in art what so ever.

I presented it at the Electronic Visualisation and the Arts conference in London (EVA London), UK in 2012 and published it as my PhD in 2014. Below are the links and the abstract.

http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/EVA2012.43

Abstract

Undergraduate, Interactive Games Design (IGD) courses offered by technical universities in the UK recruit students who are not required to have art or design backgrounds. However, they need to be able to represent their creative ideas. Observations at the University of Gloucestershire have shown that many students find difficulties in expressing their ideas in a visual manner as they do not have adequate drawing skills and eventually some focus on coding and some withdraw. This thesis investigates the links between game design and drawing skills, examining concepts of creativity, learning, design communication and education. To establish the basis of this problem, it was necessary to gain an insight into students‘ and tutors‘ viewpoints and interpretation of this course. Using an interpretive philosophical framework, a mixed method approach was chosen to allow for greater opportunity to understand the phenomenon. Within an action research paradigm, the research was carried out in an evolutionary manner. The extent of the problem was established by eliciting tutors‘ insight from other institutions both arts and technical based. A case study was set out to study two cohorts of students. This identified the problems reported by students and the impact of these on students‘ attitude and motivation. The nature and necessity of drawing skills for sketching storyboards were explored by gaining views of students, tutors and industry professionals. The effect of the tutor-led Art interventions at UoG was investigated. The research identified criteria to assess the quality of storyboard communications and finally a framework for an e-learning object to develop storyboard communication skills was specified. This study revealed that obtaining visual skills is fundamental in order to be able to draw or use rapid prototyping techniques for storyboarding. This needs to be addressed in a specified module or several sessions. It appeared that the design of an art intervention (tutor-based or e-learning object) for IGD students, needs to address the issues of confidence and teamwork alongside with the learning materials in a constructive and gamified style and as interactive as possible in a structured goal-based manner. It would also benefit from Active learning teaching style.