Build and edit your own video game experiences like a pro – checkout these short term designing courses to get started

Create the next Angry Birds – next Pokemon GO – next Watchdog or more.

You do not have to be a gaming fan to get started. If you are willing to take the challenges, you can find a great career option in video game designing.

This industry needs professional expertise in various fields, from graphic design and game play mechanics, to programming and probability. Depending on your aptitude and inspiration, you can learn any aspects of game designing.

For example, if you are creative, artistic you can go for storyboarding, drawing and character creation. But if you are more tech savvy, get into technical aspects like Artificial Intelligence, graphics and novel input devices. 

Many institutes also offer training for Immersive Game Development, Video Game Programming and Game Hardware Architectures, among many other courses.

In this article, I will introduce you to five of the best game design courses that will help you enter the gaming industry like a pro.

Character Design & Animation

This course will let you explore concepts and approaches involved in designing a character. Starting with the basic design theory, color and shape, to adding various animations like movement, expression and posing, this course covers all the stages of designing a character in step by step process.

Landscape Concept Art for Film and Games

The great landscapes in video games are created by diligent, efficient digital painting techniques in Photoshop. In this landscape design course you will learn a step-by-step approach to painting a fantasy landscape. Where to get ideas and inspiration from? What to research? and how to find different kind of references?

This is often a short term advanced course that moves very quickly from one concept to the next, covering every part of the process from sketching in Photoshop to the final piece.

Creating Compelling Environments

Designing the game environments is a very challenging task. You have to know the theme of the game, where it takes place? Urban or Rural? Interior or Exterior? What time is it in – past, future or present time? You have to be specific about what location you are trying to depict, city, jungle, bar. If it is a city, you must know which city you want to set your map in. What specific area within the city?

This course would help you learn the core principles of sketching, lighting, composition, color and design. And at the completion of this course, you will know how to create your own compelling environments for game.

Design in-game assets

Game assets include everything that can go into a game aside from code, scripts and documentation. Like 3D models, sprites, sound effects, music, code snippets and modules. Check out these games: Sparta, War of Empires, Soldiers Inc. on Plarium. These games are classic examples of variations in-game assets development by skilled programmers.

After taking this short course on developing game assets, you will know how to create isometric props/assets for different video game levels using both Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

Coding using a game Engine

This course is designed for beginners & intermediate students. Here you can learn to develop free game using Game Engines like Unity 5 and Unreal that you can deploy to iOS, Android, Steam, Web, XBox One, PS4 and more...

Some courses also teach you about how to make a game for VR (Google Cardboard) using Unity. This course is for beginner to intermediate students, No prior programming knowledge or Unity knowledge is required, and if you have any experience it will only help.

When you are planning to step into the gaming industry, you must acknowledge that millions of gamers worldwide look forward to video game release dates, which means you would have to be deadline-conscious. If you are both ‘creative and good time management skills, you will be considered an asset to your employer.