Learn what a successful game designer does and how they think.

Rochester Institute of Technology Online Course Highlights

5 weeks per course
3 hours per week, per course
Learn for FREE, Ugpradable
Self-Paced
Taught by: Kevin Bierre, Stephen Jacobs, Jon-Paul Dyson, Ian Schreiber, Sten McKinzie, Al Biles
View Course Syllabus

Online Course Details:

Imagine what it would be like to turn your love of playing video games into a career. What skills would you need to become a successful video game designer, and what job opportunities could you pursue in the industry?

In this XSeries, those questions and more will be answered by Rochester Institute of Technology’s Game Design and Development faculty and the director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at The Strong National Museum of Play. You will learn how various roles within the video game design discipline work together, helping you dive deeper into your area of interest and the career paths available.

RIT’s Game Design and Development program is ranked third in the Princeton Review’s “Top Schools for Video Game Design for 2016” and has been in the Top 10 for years. Students in the program are part of a vibrant and active new media community, building, sharing and learning all forms and shapes of games and new media. Students who have successfully completed the RIT program have been hired to work at some of the industry’s top employers, including Amazon Games, Apple, Bungie Studios, Blizzard Entertainment, EA Games, Epic Games, Google, Konami Gaming Inc., Microsoft, Rockstar Games, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Valve Corporation and Walt Disney Interactive. For gamers looking to excel, our Master Counter Strike Gaming Skills courses are a must.

This is a series of 5 courses that can be taken in any order, however we recommend that Elements of Gameplay Programming for Video Game Designers be taken last in the sequence whenever possible.

Courses

Video Game Design History

Learn about the evolution of video games from experts at The Strong National Museum of Play, the world’s largest collection of video game materials.

Video Game Design and Balance

Learn about the video game design process and experiment with effective methods for balancing a game’s mechanics.

Video Game Asset Creation and Process

Learn about the tools, processes and platforms that allow video game assets to be created and assembled into a commercial game.

Video Game Design: Teamwork & Collaboration

Learn how a team comes together to create, market and deliver a video game.

Gameplay Programming for Video Game Designers

Learn how to create the best gameplay by understanding algorithmic thinking in simple programming problems and applying it to game design.

What You’ll Learn:

The origin and evolution of game mechanics and its effective integration into video games
The design process and method of balancing a game’s design and mechanics for optimum effect
How different industry roles collaborate to produce, market, and ship a video game
How engines and different assets are created and brought together to build a video game
How to create some simple elements of running game code