WHAT IS GAME DESIGN? 
Welcome to Game Design School!
Now just before we start, lets have a quick look into how this is structured!
The structure for the pages is:
1) Study the theory parts, videos and diagrams.
2) Read the Tetris part.
3) Do the exercises.
4) Advance to the next page.
That's it!
Games have existed pretty much as long as civilisation. But what is a game? It has goals, rules, challenges and interactivity. One of the best definitions is from the creator of Civilization Sid Meier: “Game is a series of interesting choices”. This is a pretty good definition to use to test your game. Does it provide a series of interesting choices?
Game Design defines how a game works. Like how many coins you get from collecting a treasure chest. Or what happens when you pick up a sword.
Game Designer creates the rules and ensures everything works nicely together.
How would a metro map work as the game board? What are the rules and what is the goal? You will learn numerous ways how to solve this. And you will learn the skill of game design!
On every page what has just been taught will be applied into Tetris. This is an extremely efficient way to learn. Look for this icon to see how it is applied to Tetris.
For Tetris, the game designer has decided the shape of the blocks, dropping speed, height of the level and scoring. Basically anything that affects the gameplay experience has been designed!
To really learn game design, do all the exercises, which are said to be the best part of the course!
Your first exercise is to write down here:
1. Why are you here and what do you want to learn?
2. What is game design?
We will later come back to these to see where we started from!
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