#also like: the niche au is about a competivive games design challenge so like.

[other-peoples-coats]

Sorry about this one because you seemed a little frustrated with people asking about game designs but I’m thinking that’s like video game type stuff? So would that be like the math side of things? Or the non math side? And if it’s the math side, how’s your arithmetic? Cause mines awful and I want to know if I’ll get it back. Sorry if I’m totally off on my guess.

Oh, no, I'm not frustrated at all, I love game design and I'm-- hmm, sad, I guess, that it's not really a field that I can work in for multiple reasons, some of which are personal and some of which are just that it's a very unstable field to keep a job in (like, uh, most creative industries), and like, I love to be able to pay rent and not change jobs every year or two, and some of which is that games design has terrible working conditions as like, a super common thing (though there are starting to be unions, so, y'know, it's improving! slowly. very slowly.) Also the sexism. Can't overstate how fucking sexist some parts of games design are. (gamergate was Peak My Experince In Games Design, so. Handful of salt there.) The gender breakdown in games design is getting better, but when I went though uni, I was in a cohort of 60, and there were...5 not-dudes. Including me. The global percentage of not-dude games designers then was about 6% -- it's up to I think nearly 30% now? which is great! but still not really near parity. But yeah, game design is making games! video games, table top games like Dungeons and Dragons, board games, all that, though mostly when you see the phrase games design (or games development) not otherwise specified it's talking about video games, though that's not limited to stuff on a console (PS5, Wii, etc) but also includes mobile games and computer games and online games, etc. And games design covers both the math and not math side, plus a bunch more! you have programmers, and artists, and designers, and writers, and producers, and musicians, and a bunch more areas of specialization, all of which have their own areas of sub-specialization! So, taking artists as an example, you can have concept artists (who draw a bunch of sketches about what things in the game might look like -- everything from the characters to the levels to like, menus and collectables and background rocks), you have 2D and/or 3D artists (who draw/make 3D models of the chosen concept art), you have animators (who animate the 2D/3D art -- running, moving, flags blowing in the breeze, the cut scenes, whatever else), you have VFX artists (who do like, particle effects, lighting, water ripples sometimes, etc), UI artists (who make the UI)... the list goes on and on and on. That said! who is doing what, and how specialized anyone is, depends very much on how big a company is. Huge mega companies (bioware, EA -- you know, the Big Publishers who make Big Budget Games) have enormous teams that can have very granular specializations -- like, this is The Person Who Makes Concept Art Of Destructable Crates granular -- while smaller companies might have This is our Two Concept Artists, They Draw Everything, and this is Our Animator, they do All Animation and VFX. And then you have indies, which can be all the way down to 'this is Our Artist, they do Everything That Isn't Programing'. (Or 'I am the One Person Doing Everything') As you might, uh, guess, I am Not a programmer (who are the folks who have to deal with maths, though not all of them!). I officially started training as an artist, but kind of slid over to the design side of things (so, what's a game mechanic, how does this game work, what has to happen when, what's the level layout, what's the story, etc), and then slid even further into narrative design, which is...writing the game story, plus doing things like 'ok, the player has to know that Yellow Eyes = Evil, so how do we draw attention to that?' or 'this is a tutorial level, how does that fit into the story? Dagobah Swamp Moon training montage time!' plus, like, dialog, all of...anything that makes the game story. As for my arithmetic -- it's hot garbage. Sorry anon. My maths has always been, uuuuuuuh questionable -- I can do highschool level 'advanced' mathematics like imaginary numbers and array transformations, but ask me basic multiplication or addition and I'm very quickly like :) I don't know what a number is :) -- but there are very much areas of games design that don't need maths, so.