Game Design

Games often appeal to us because of one simple fact: they’re fun! But why is that? In order to find that out, Game Design aims to transform you from avid gamers to daring and critical game creators.

To do this, we will give you the toolkit you’ll need to identify the feelings you want to evoke in the player, the message you want to convey, and what kind of fun you want to provide them with. You’ll use these insights to design your own games, and learn how the individual elements of a game come together to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts.

You won’t just be designing, of course: you’ll also be developing your game. The goal is to turn your design into a playable demo using one of the industry-standard game engines like Unity, Godot or Unreal Engine. To do this, you’ll receive technical support and workshops explaining core development and design practices, storytelling basics, sound design, and more. We will host various open playtesting events to validate your design.

You'll be creating worlds; players will traverse the great plains and climb the majestic mountains that you envisioned.

In this semester you will work on the following projects:

• Launch week: Start Your Game Engines!

In this project, you learn the primary tool of game development, the game engine (Unity). It prepares you for the rest of the semester, allowing you to focus on design principles.

• The Game Pie

During these 2 weeks, you enter a pressure cooker with 5 other students, introducing you to critical game research, game design, and rapid prototyping.

• Your Own Game

In this duo project, you and a partner create a game you really, really want to make! The games industry is a passion industry so it is important to work on something you love. You apply your learnings from The Game Pie course in Your Own Game.

• Industry Project

For the Industry Project you create a game for a real client in a complex context. The context ranges from entertainment, health, applied, VR games and more. This is the last project of this semester and you will work together in groups of 5 or 6 students.

By the end of the semester, you will have several game demos you can proudly share, complete with an exciting gameplay trailer.

The semester Game Development prepares you with hands-on experience with game engines and introduces you to game design jargon, which accelerates your progress in this semester.

After Game Design, you can do an internship in the direction of software engineering, game design, or user experience. For students motivated to go deeper and further in producing a game towards the market, we suggest the follow-up Game Production topic.

In Tilburg this semester is provided in combination with other topics.