You don’t have to wait to come to the university before you start finding out, and learning more, about various aspects of games design. There are many good sources of information that can help you to learn about what games design is all about. These include books, magazines, information on YouTube and other online sources. As you find out more about game design, you can make a more informed decision whether this is something that you would like to choose as a future career. You can also use these sources to prepare for your university course in game design if you already know that you want to study game design.
If you know that you would like to study Games Design as a university degree and you are at the stage of choosing your A Levels or pre-university courses, you have several choices.
1- If you are going to study A Levels, choose at least an A Levels in Art & Design (to improve your art and drawing skills), A Level in Computing ( to improve your coding and programming skills) and an A Level in subjects such as Psychology, Sociology, English, Critical Thinking, History, etc. (to improve your wider understanding of people, society and language and communication).
2- You can also decide to study a good BETEC Level 3 in ‘Games Design’.
Here are some useful sources to get you started:
Books:
In addition to books, you can read the EDGE Magazine and look at some game design related websites such as: Polygon, Gamasutra, Develop, The Guardian Games, EuroGamer, CVG, IGN, and Joystiq
Software and Tutorials:
Our main game engine is Unreal4. You can download it for free from UnrealEngine site
(click the blue “Get Unreal” link on the top right hand corner of the site). The company has many tutorials online. You will have access to a wider range of tutorial when you log in here. There is also a YouTube Channel for Unreal game Engine full of useful tutorials. There are some very useful and informative materials about various aspects of game design on YouTube.
We also use range of software, from Adobe and Autodesk that make some of the main professional software packages used in game industry.
Our main 3D modelling software is 3DS MAX by Autodesk. If you have a student email, you can download a wide range of software, including 3DsMax, from the Autodesk website Education section.
There are also some online software training companies such as Lynda.com and Pluralsight that provide up-to-date training on a wide range of software including many that are used in the game industry.
You will learn a lot by watching the ‘Extra Credit’ series on YouTube. They are informative and entertaining.
The ‘Crash Course Games’ series is also informative.
If you would like to find out about how a commercial game is made and other aspects of life in a game company, watch this informative documentary. It has several parts, but well worth watching.
There are a lot of free online training materials for the tools we use to create games. Here is some training materials for our main game engine Unreal 4.
If you need to learn to draw, or improve your drawing skills, there are many good books on how to draw and many online tutorials, e.g. have a look at the following links.