Games Design BA (Hons)

University of the Arts London

BA (Hons) Games Design will teach you how to take the software tools of games design and create new gaming experiences. Explore skills sought by industry, such as storyboarding, coding and play testing which will enable you to translate your ideas into playable games.

Working from original concepts, you will develop ideas and test them to evaluate their experience of play. You'll not only design the players interaction with the game mechanics but also the visual feedback needed to communicate the player’s progress, the various gamestates and the behaviours of individual game objects and characters. This concept-to-game approach is supported by the growing theoretical area of games studies. This course is taught at London College of Communication, at Elephant and Castle, part of University of the Arts London (UAL).

What can you expect?

You'll be taught in a way that encourages you to regularly generate new concepts and to remain innovative in your practice. You'll learn the design and development skills necessary to put you at the forefront of this growing profession and which are sought after by leading design and software companies worldwide.Key topics covered include interactive design, the psychology of games, designing the experience of play, computer programming and 3D modelling. You'll learn how to write game design documents starting from the initial concept, before mastering the various stages of development. Put your newly acquired skills into practice as you continually build playable games throughout the course. During this process, you'll demonstrate storyboarding and visualisation techniques to communicate ideas with linear or non-linear content. You'll also be expected to analyse gaming trends and identify unique selling points to build into the game's hooks and features; to create your own animated content, adding functionality with scripting before testing for performance and usability. The final major project gives you the opportunity to research an aspect of games design that is of particular interest to you and to present your findings in a dissertation.

About London College of Communication

London College of Communication is for the curious, the brave and the committed: those who want to transform themselves and the world around them. Through a diverse, world-leading community of teaching, research and partnerships with industry, we enable our students to succeed as future-facing creatives in the always-evolving design, media and screen industries. The London College of Communication experience is all about learning by doing. Our students get their hands dirty and develop their skills through the exploration of our facilities and technical spaces. Students work on live briefs and commissions, with everything from independent start-ups and charities in Southwark, through to major global companies, including Penguin, the National Trust and Royal Mail, to name a few.