In one of the preliminary sessions of the ABAI Fest and KAVGC Summit 2015, Joshi Mark Premnath – one of the instrumental people behind setting up Dhruva Interactive – currently running Orange Squirrel Studios, spoke on the difference and importance of game design and game art.
“If you believe game design and game art is one and the same thing, then you are highly mistaken,” he exerted. “According to me game design and game art (along with programming) are two parallel roads leading to the same destination.”
He emphasised on the fact that be it games or anything else in life, if one is not passionate about it then it won’t really reap sweet success. He further added that game design is instrumental in setting the pace for every other aspect of creating games, “Unless there is a game design concept in place it won’t really help if the art designer and programmer begin working on the game. So just like animation or live action; pre-production is very important for the creation of a successful product,” he added.
Mark also informed that the game production teams are much more smaller and close knit now as compared to the ones maybe even 5-10 years ago. “A team can comprise of a designer, an artist, a programmer, a team lead/producer and an audio engineer; also the best part nowadays is one guy can double up and manage two or more roles as well.”
He further went on to explain what are actually the essential elements that are required before designing a game. The first thing that he emphasised on was motivation behind the game, next was to choose the right genre and target audience for it and then look at other things like game testing, research, monetisation and development plan.
“The platform on which the game needs to be played on is another thing one has to keep in mind. We need to conduct research and also look at measures like App Annie which give a realistic picture of what games are doing well and which games can be worked upon,” Mark explained.
He then spoke of how game art is actually just an enabler for the design, and this is well supported by the programmer. He further added that games are really evolving with time and even simple mobile games are actually earning more than AAA games.
“There is always the argument of whether to create a free to play or a premium game, but actually at the end of the day if you are confident of the way your game plays out and if you have taken into consideration all aspects while creating the game, then it should do well regardless,” he ended.