
Game Design Curriculum - hmmazoids
https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/curriculum-guide
======
munificent
Game design (whether computer or even board games) is a valuable topic to
learn even if you never make a real game. If you make any kind of _thing_ that
people use, learning a little about how to think like a game designer can help
you make things that are more rewarding and pleasant to use.

One way to think of videogames is that they are _useless software_. Imagine a
word processor that couldn't save or print files. Or a compiler that didn't
generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone
ever use such a pointless thing?

Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don't really touch any part of
the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They're self
contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can't get
anything tangible in return? It's because the process of using the software
itself—playing the game—is so _intrinsically_ enjoyable.

If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that _does_ do
something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted
fanbases.

~~~
Danieru
Incredible how many posters are missing your point!

As a gamedev I 100% agree with your assertion that games are useless. An
expression I use in game design is "fictional friction". Nothing in my game is
real. None of the struggle is essential. Every mouse click or decision was a
fiction I designed for players.

Nothing prevents me from giving players infitnite money, in fact there is a
dev cheat menu which does just that. Instead all my effort revolves around
crafting fake value for otherwise meaningless bits.

Thus games are the peak of software design: people put up with other software
to pay for chances to play mine.

~~~
juanuys
While we have the gamedevs here, and we're talking about game design, I would
very much love and appreciate if you could upload a picture of your bookshelf
and share it here.

I'm almost done with the Coursera CalArts game design specialisation, and they
have cited a few resources, but I want to know what the industry recommend
amongst themselves.

(That said, I've found the peer assessments on Coursera utterly lacking, some
of the videos hard to understand and badly captioned, and will be starting a
master's in game design in September...)

~~~
Danieru
That's a fun question. Personally we do not have more than a couple dozen
books in total at our house. This is more the product of my generation plus
living in Japan where no one can afford the dead space for a book shelf.

For the subject matter I would say your best set of resources is GDC
presentations. Our industry's great minds never write books, or even web
articles for that matter. Best they give are the occasional GDC presentation.
Even then Miyamoto has maybe given a couple hours of publicly accessible
teaching material in his entire career.

If you are interested in Rendering that fields has a good number of useful
books written. Design itself is more about "theories of games". Everyone has
their own theories, mine might be more influenced by Sid Meier than anything.

My experience has been with a couple western designers, but more so stalwart
japanese designers. On the Japanese side you'd be surprise how "personal" the
design philosophies are. Westerners tend to be more rule driven, and thus if
you want a systems driven understanding of design that needs to come from the
west.

The training system in Japan is more apprenticeship driven. What the west
would call designers first start as planners. Planner being a rather low level
job with lots of manual grunt work. Then within a company the senior designers
will couch the juniors on the subject of game design.

Thus there indeed does exist tomes on Nintendo's game design: but no one
outside Nintendo has ever seen it and no one Ex-Nintendo can talk about it.
Just look at how Ojiro
([https://twitter.com/moppin_](https://twitter.com/moppin_)) designer of
Downwell went silent after joining Nintendo, then after leaving has remained
silent.

Off the top of my head I know for sure Nintendo & Bandai use this "in-company
learning" structure. Square Enix being a collection of fiefdoms tends more
towards hiring a designer they like then putting them in charge of a team.
Hence how you got Tokyo RPG Factory.

Note I'm approaching this with the understanding that a good game only has 1
lead designer. In Japan this is the game's director. It might be that in the
west game's have a more group driven approach.

~~~
juanuys
Thank you for highlighting the West's rules/systems-driven approach vs the
mentoring approach in Japan.

I an indeed infinitely curious about the personal design philosophies of all
the secretive greats. I guess there's something special inside all of us (game
designers), and we just need to find it and nurture it. Books are good for
starters, and up to a point.

PS good luck with Railgrade!

------
mooman219
(Riot's less than stellar history aside) I see these takes on game design a
lot, and they're interesting to see because everyone takes their own stance on
how to construct a fun game from distinct smaller concepts. Yahtzee’s Dev
Diary [0] talks a lot about loops (And I give it a watch recommendation),
while at your average GDC talk you hear about the concept of pillars [1] and
their role in shaping games. I'm interested to hear if anyone else has
resources on other game design takes.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbArC2mvokQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbArC2mvokQ)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzQDVtysXjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzQDVtysXjA)

~~~
mattmanser
I've not played duskers (2). But from watching the video, sounds like he was
super lucky. A happy accident, rather than an utter disaster.

One of those definite cases of survivorship bias.

~~~
rdw
I was privy to some of the development process of Duskers, and I would say
that Tim worked pretty hard to create opportunities for happy accidents to
befall him. There were several other prototypes that he was working on at the
same time, but only Duskers crossed the finish line. This is not uncommon
among game developers I've known; generally they're bursting with ideas and
have many in-progress experiments in various stages at any time. It's a little
like an incubator, where there's a diversity of ideas in order to have a
better chance of having one be a hit.

There is survivorship bias, but it's kinda all happening within the one
designer.

------
madrox
Despite thinking Riot has excellent insight into competitive game development,
I'm pretty cynical about their recent wave of sharing since it wreaks of image
repair. It doesn't matter what there is to learn from Riot if the culture is
poisonous, and I don't believe it's changed much since the last wave of
allegations. It's a shame, since this looks pretty substantive, but I'd rather
learn this elsewhere.

~~~
mooman219
It's extremely difficult in Riot's case to separate the content they make from
the culture of their company, and I agree with you that it's not really
possible to do. I think that this resource is still an interesting collection
of material and it's worth the time evaluating on its merits while keeping the
perspective of the company's values in mind.

------
Animats
They put a PowerPoint into a PDF into a scrollable window too small to display
a full slide. Ouch.

The course itself is interesting, in that it's not a programming course at
all. It's about what makes a game fun. Download the PDF and look at page 6,
which has the useful info.

~~~
ihuman
There's a download link above the PDF view that allows you to view/download
the PDF directly

------
sali0
Disclaimer: I am a DotA fan/nerd and am a huge fan of its design vs LoL's.

I applaud Riot for this, but I think they're specialty and reason for their
huge growth is more to do with outreach, as jimbob45 noted. For a company with
such a focus on competitive PvP games, I would argue they are not very good at
balance at all. I would even go so far to say that their monetization scheme
is detrimental to the balance of the game because of the incentive mismatch
with creating a balanced game vs a profitable one. With that said, I think
they have gotten a lot better over the years, and no one can take away from
their success.

~~~
sudofail
I agree with you, but I also wonder if balance is somewhat of an anti-pattern.
By changing the balance of the game, they're influencing the meta builds and
play styles, which keeps things interesting. So in a way, creating imbalances
is a feature to keep the game fresh. All of this within reason of course.

~~~
sali0
I would agree with you IF you take traditional view of 'balance' in the way
that LoL and other simpler games do. I would call that ideal a 'symmetric'
balance, where they want each element in its category to be compared to all
other elements in the same category. LoL definitely strives for this, as do
many other games. Each champion is balanced against other champions of the
same role. Items are relatively inflexible and augment the already present
abilities of the champion. Each champion is essentially a complete package and
each uses items to enhance what they already have. But when you have such
rigid categories, power creep and best-in-slot champions will naturally
appear, as whatever is best able to maximize their item's stats will be meta.
My first competitive game was LoL back in its beta, and I was hooked, but what
opened my eyes to what balance could be was DotA's approach.

DotA takes a systemic approach to balance. Each hero is a tool in the team's
toolbox. Most heroes have very specific strengths and weaknesses, and their
powerspikes are very pronounced. When you draft a team, you are specifically
drafting a set of capabilities that you want to exploit against the enemy.
This also leads to heroes having very hard counters. But I think the real
beauty in DotA is it's item system, which allows you to patch holes in your
team's composition and allow a huge amount of flexibility for each hero. I can
keep going forever, as I really love its game design. But the most important
thing that DotA does in terms of balance is its holistic approach that allows
heroes to be individual components to a team, and have items to augment
strengths or patch holes that the draft was not prepared for. (DotA's design
and metagame sparked my interest in Complex Adaptive Systems, so I just nerd
out about it any chance I get).

So to your point, I think the whole need to create imbalance is caused because
of the way Riot balances their characters in the first place. I think it is
fundamentally flawed from a design perspective, but it obviously makes them a
ton of money. They really mastered monetization of multiplayer games. They
also made their game very approachable for noobs, and that I have to commend
them for.

------
bovermyer
The thing that I take away from this is that this could be indicative of a
shift away from the modern concept of university and towards a strengthening
of the old master-apprentice models of learning.

------
withinrafael
I was genuinely interested in this, however, after clicking around I couldn't
find anything more than PDFs with empty areas for taking notes and vague
curriculum module descriptions. Am I missing something? Perhaps there's
missing content when viewing the page via mobile. Will revisit from my PC
later.

~~~
mooman219
The content here is a guide on how to teach the concepts outlined in the
curriculum, and is not necessarily a self instruction course. See module one:
[https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/fun-and-
feeling](https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/fun-and-feeling)

~~~
withinrafael
Sure, but how do you teach these concepts without a source of truth? I can't
find any reference material.

Edit: Just discovered the lesson plan download link under the headings,
separate from the buttons at the bottom of the page. It helps, though am still
confused about how anyone would use this material.

------
smogcutter
The “8 kinds of fun” have been a huge help to me as a D&D DM. It’s a great
framework for running adventures that players will respond to and give
everyone a chance to find their fun.

It also helps answer micro, nuts and bolts like what kinds of rewards your
players will respond to. For example, a player really into challenge might
only care about the stats on a magic sword they find, but a player more into
narrative or exploration will dig a sword with a mysterious engraving on the
hilt even if it isn’t necessarily an upgrade. Real life people usually respond
to multiple categories, but if you pay attention during the game you _will_
see this at work.

I got onto this via a post at theangrygm.com, who I really recommend. He’s
super opinionated, and the “angry GM” schtick gets old, but he knows what he’s
talking about.

------
jimbob45
IMHO the biggest innovation Riot brought to the industry was player outreach.
They were the first to heavily (30+ posts per day across multiple devs)
interact with their player base. Even better, their patch notes were the first
to have paragraphs explaining each change. Even _better_ , they stuck to a bi-
weekly patch cycle religiously, unlike Blizzard, who had to be begged to put
out a patch every six months.

To players who actually played SC2 and LoL circa 2011, it wasn’t a surprise
when LoL became the premiere e-sport and SC2 withered away.

~~~
CyanBird
I never picked up lol early, but I do vividly recall all the screeching wars
between Hon (heroes of newerth) , Dota and lol people

The agreement was that lol won because it was free, tho it looked and played
worse than either Dota or Hon, but the free aspect won riot the entire
emerging markets sector

Me as a SC2 player through and through I just looked down on them overall, so
feel free to correct me if I am wrong

------
MaximumMadness
Of all the non-FAANG gaming companies Riot is the one that most closely
operates like a tech giant to me (with the exception of maybe Epic Games)

They have an incredibly robust M&A division, have mastered land + expand with
their esports, are putting down roots in pretty much every major gaming
category, and have modern monetization practices down to a tee.

Excluding the clearly egregious cultural issues, I would be fairly confident
in betting on Riot in the long term

~~~
Aerroon
> _I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term_

Tencent already did that more than 10 years ago. I wonder how they pick who to
invest into, because it seems that in the gaming space they have their hand in
almost everything successful. And how come others aren't doing the same?

------
tester756
I must say that they're probably the most competent studio on the market

LoL is probably the only game that I play (maybe once a year I decide to spend
up to 50h over some peroid on one title like GTA V or something) for years and
it almost always feels "fresh" and very competitive.

~~~
abledon
LoL is also an amazing spectator sport, the format is so fun to watch.
OverWatch/CS-GO/Valorant/Fortnite etc... the FPS aspect is a harder to follow
especially for people with slower eye movement.

Lol on the other hand, its like watching Soccer/Golf/Football except the
players also have magic/hi-tech abilities. The "depth" of the strategy is also
sooo much more than an FPS. flex picks, lane swaps, lane freezing , meta
shifts, (also mechanics but that spans across all esports).

Then theres also the music division, that collaborates with mega pop stars in
korea/us/south america

~~~
FreezerburnV

        The "depth" of the strategy is also sooo much more than an FPS
    

You only think that because you know more about LoL. As someone very into
Overwatch, it's an absurdly complicated game where you only know about the
complexity once you learn about it. After having learned a lot more about the
game, I can look at high-level play and "see" a lot more of the things they're
doing due to the level of complexity of the game, just like you can see that
same stuff watching LoL.

At a high level, Overwatch is complicated because it effectively combines MOBA
elements with FPS elements. It's not really a straight FPS, and the higher
skill you get the more you have to pay attention to the MOBA elements in order
to do well. As an example: Zarya is a tank whose entire ability kit (sans
ultimate) is built around using an ability on herself and a teammate (on
different cooldowns) to protect them from damage/negative effects for 2
seconds at a time. This ability can be destroyed if 200 damage is done to the
player it's affecting, and Zarya gains increased damage if damage is done to
this ability up to a cap. It sounds simple, but players who have mastered
Zarya are ones who know _when_ to use these two abilities, which order, etc.
which has a lot to do with the current state of the game. Bad Zarya players
use both abilities instantly and simultaneously the second they see the
opponent. It's all about timing abilities... which sounds a lot like playing a
MOBA. But you also have to be good at aim and master the two firing modes she
has, among the many, many other things to pay attention to during gameplay.

I don't whether LoL or Overwatch has more "depth", but they both have a lot of
it.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Let me start a flamewar by informing you both that Dota 2 exists, and has much
more complicated spells. And hence more depth. At least that's what people who
have played both LoL and Dota 2 say.

~~~
spdionis
Everything the GP has described is essentially only the mechanics part of a
Dota 2 game. The strategic part of the game has way more depth than "use your
abilities at the right time in the right order".

~~~
abdullahkhalids
I agree to a large extent, but the last 2-3 years have not been kind to the
Dota 2 strategic landscape. In the strategic rock-paper-scissors of
teamfighting beats ganking beats splitpushing beats teamfighting, teamfighting
has been overpowered by Valve.

It's not really possible to consistently win in pro Dota by ganking or
splitpushing strategies. Only occasionally, can you do it, when you have a
clear draft advantage the opponents don't see, and a clear plan that you can
execute flawlessly. While, if both teams go for the teamfight strategy, then
there is much more room for mistakes.

------
DreamOther
Their MMR system has changed over the years to maximize revenue at the expense
of player pain. They force the above-average player to play 100s of games
climb to rank where they "belong" per season, gradually increasing the amount
of time required to be absolutely absurd. Combine that with their lack of care
for the toxicity in their player base and you have one hot stinky mess, and I
wouldn't put a high schooler anywhere near their core game design values.
Direct reflection of their (bad) company culture.

In the micro, fun and well designed gameplay (Valorant too!). In the macro,
their games are a terrible slog rooted in addiction science. All to maximize
revenue from rolling skin and champion releases. Every single champion is
released overpowered to add a temporary boost in play time and revenue. We can
do better.

------
zanethomas
Riot Games, isn't that the game company wholly owned by TenCent?

~~~
terrycody
yeah I guess so, at least purchased most of its stock?

------
BossingAround
Is there any good game design curriculum you'd recommend? The webpage above is
not suitable for self-paced learners...

------
tebruno99
Bad joke sorry

~~~
ev1
People are downvoting you, but this is actually a ridiculously common thing in
games.

The entire game industry is pretty bad in general compared to tech or
otherwise: one huge concept is that you have to "love the game"; you're
willing to take low pay, low benefits, deal with overrun unpaid overtime
hours, etc. because you "love the game". Most game companies freely tell you
about how disposable you are because they have hordes of players, many willing
to work for free.

Riot has serious problems with this. The C-level that was repeatedly reported
(for years) for grabbing testicles, dryhumping employees or farting on them is
still in their role and hasn't been removed - they were just suspended for a
month or two and reinstated. The gender-discrimination forced new legal
counsel just a few months ago due to possible collusion.

~~~
echelon
How the hell does this fly? Why haven't employees sued the hell out of the
company?

Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours
and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.

The games industry is sickly and broken.

~~~
ev1
From 2018 case (just google "riot farting" honestly):
[https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/6454fy6neo6mwj3w/images/5-7...](https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/6454fy6neo6mwj3w/images/5-70337ee921.jpg)

> Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work
> hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.

Some do! I would imagine many indie game companies are not like this. There's
kind of a split, where you have "strictly-business" companies - many Asian
MMORPG publishers that have a subsidiary in the US are like this. There is no
gaming culture, it's just a standard workday. You might get some plushies at
the office or a poster or two.

The "cool" companies, like Riot and Blizzard, complete with campus statues of
game characters and a culture to match, conference rooms named after game
characters or items, are what gamers seem to want to look up to, though.

If you've played any MMORPG long enough, you'll see a lot of recurring themes,
kids gleefully willing to "answer support tickets for free" and "I'll be a GM
they don't even need to pay me" \-- this probably is part of the reason that
produces toxic culture, along with the fact that if you strictly hire only
gamers, you're already going to almost certainly have a higher toxicity
demographic in the first place, depending on the game. If we're talking
something like Harvest Moon or similar, of course there's going to be close to
no toxic players.

Riot's primary product involves matchmaking you into 4 other random people
that you have to cooperate with for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or
more, where one person can lose the game for everyone by repeatedly dying to
the enemy and making the enemy stronger. If you leave, you get banned or
penalised for abandoning your team; this includes virtually unwinnable
dragged-out hour long matches. You can kind of see how this playerbase would
differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game.

It's very difficult to boycott a game you've spent tens of thousands of hours
on - a game that you're good at, that you have friends on, that you've spent
heaps of cash shop currency on lootboxes for. Even if you desperately dislike
the developer. This happens for many companies - look at all the loudmouthed
people on reddit et al screaming about how no one should support EA or
Blizzard, and then a month later go buy the new expansion pack for something
and buy lootboxes and forget about it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual
> singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game._

Oh yes. I must say, these days I hate playing multiplayer game modes with
leaderboards attached.

Relevant to this thread: I used to play Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard's LoL
clone) causally with friends. Then one day a colleague dragged me into his
team, full of people dozens of levels above me (and otherwise experienced
progamers). That was one stressful evening where I could tell everyone hated
the noob that was me. My reflexes were OK, but my "meta" wasn't.

I never played a game of HotS with that colleague again.

I mean, seriously, I want to play games where one can excel in out-thinking
the opponent. But HotS progaming feels more like an exercise in memorizing
obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of
character stats.

~~~
prerok
Well, the history is a bit different. LoL was created as a clone from Dota
(Defense of the Ancients) mod for Warcraft 3. So, DOTA 2 is a continuation of
that story and Blizzard basically recreated the mod into a standalone game and
called it DOTA 2.

I do agree with the sentiment though. The community is definitively not n00b
friendly and I gave up soon as well :S

~~~
purple-again
Blizzard did not do that. Valve (the company behind Steam) did that. Much salt
was sown around the Blizzard offices during the lawsuits that followed. Valve
won.

Blizzard went on to release a remake of the game that spawned DOTA which was
universally reviled, a large part of which was due to them killing incentives
to build custom maps with their new IP rules designed to avoid another DOTA
incident.

Armchair analysis with no expertise or special access to information, accuracy
of statements may vary.

~~~
abdulmuhaimin
In case people are wondering, hes talking about Warcraft 3 Reforged, which is
a remake of Warcraft 3. A real disaster of a release, I couldnt imagine anyone
could have f __* up such a beloved game worse than Blizzard could.

------
runawaybottle
The problem I have with courses like this is it validates careers that lack
integrity.

Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics.

The same with software development. Unfortunately, we as an industry validated
an entire class of people with jobs where they literally manage software
(agile people) without building actual software for years.

It doesn’t sit well with me, but life is not fair.

~~~
krapp
>Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics.

No it doesn't, any more than architecture 101 starts with bricklaying, or
novel writing 101 starts with learning typesetting and printing.

~~~
runawaybottle
These are mostly false analogies.

I don’t know enough about Architecture to point out the fundamentals that you
should be making parallels to.

For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how
to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write
creatively (e.g stories).

Back to the shot at agile, I would not expect anyone that never dealt with
deadlines or technical scoping to manage timelines for either of those things.

If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move
on to game design?

If you look at a movie, some of your bad screenplay writing can be fixed via
casting. Imagine not having any hands on experience with the process, but
alas, you move on to movie director because you took movie directing 101. It’s
insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.

~~~
krapp
>For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how
to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write
creatively (e.g stories).

Remember that the purpose of games is to communicate with the player, just as
the purpose of a novel is to communicate with the reader. Novels do this
through language, games do this through direction, design and assets, _not the
code._ I think the analogy to typesetting is correct - writing the code that
runs the game is a far lower level activity than writing the game itself.

>If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move
on to game design?

If they do, it's only because a company doesn't want to hire outside of house.
But one doesn't need to know how to write a game loop to know how to design a
game, any more than one needs to know how to design a game in order to write a
game loop. They're completely separate disciplines.

>It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.

Not necessarily to programming. It can be useful, and sometimes with small
studios or a single developer, it's unavoidable (but good design in those
cases is usually the exception rather than the rule.)

~~~
runawaybottle
If that’s the case, then my friend, you live in a better world than I’ve come
close to sniffing.

