Pretty poor course. The lectures are incomplete. Most of the learning process is left for the assignments. Finally, the scoring system for the assignments is very subjective leading to unfair evaluation. Please revise this course because it is a pity so low quality while first course is so good.

The course material was relevant and to the point, but I couldn't get rid of the impression of the course 'soullessness'. Here is why:

1. most of the reading materials are from early and mid-00s (and no one seems to care)

2. forums are only craving for reviews, otherwise would be dead

3. peer grading system may feel awkward when students receive lower than expected grades with no explanation from the reviewer

4. Casey O'Donnell is a great lecturer, but it feels like he had never got back to the course after recording it more than 5 years ago

Only because I had no previous knowledge of game design and the information was new to me, I can rate it now at 4*, otherwise it would be 3* or less.

Dear Coursera team, if you care about fixing these issues, please feel free to contact me for suggestions

Unfortunately, the course isn't very good. The subjects are told in a very abstract way. So, you are having a really hard time while doing the assignments. The instructor just keeps asking questions after questions without really teaching anything and he always says "Right?" at the end of every sentence which becomes really annoying after a while. Instead of focusing what he tells, you concantrate to hear if he is gonna say "Right?" again or not at the end of the sentence. AND HE SAYS. HE SAYS "RIGHT?" AT THE END OF EVERY SENTENCE. It's unbelieveable.

I do not want to be so offensive, but I hold the opinion that this course is useless at all. I will give up my ambition to accomplish the Game Design and Development Specialization after studying half of this course.

First of all, the course itself has a lot of problems. Videos presented by professor, quiz for each small unit and the final assignment for the week, these things have little relevance. Actually I can just complete the quiz without watching videos at all.

Secondly, the assignment workload for each week is not reasonable.For instance, you may write a high concept document in week one and come out with a game prototype in week four, but you cannot complete a game design document in only one week! It is impossible even for native speakers and for most people who study in Coursera we do not just have to learn from Coursera! We may have jobs or we need to seek for a job or we just to study other lessons in campus, we can not just spend one week on this ambiguous course.

Furthermore, the peer review criteria is totally ridiculous! You have only three grades to give others, 1 for accomplish the purpose , 3 for beyond the basic demand and 5 for doing some epic work. The most ridiculous thing is that we should give 1,3,5 points for one demand which is called "Does this assignment is in PDF HTML or TEXT form?" . How to let just uploading files to be "beyond" or "epic"?

To cut the long story short, only people with mature game ideas or only for people who are already act as game designers can fulfill this course successfully but I do not think they need an introductory level course to improve themselves at all.

This course could be more fun and informative by preparing more in-depth analysis of famous games from different genres. I'm sure reverse designing a few well-known rpg, strategy, fighting, etc. games and making an actual game design document by instructor himself could give more insight than this superfluous brief overview of topics. That being said, I'm currently taking the next course in the specialization (Game Business) and I'm pretty satisfied with quality of contents so far. So while I'm not happy with this game design course, I recommend taking the next one. Cheers.

I probably have to rate this course 5 stars just for the supplementary reading materials provided. There's a lot of great information provided here. This course helps formalize a process that highly talented people just do intuitively. With the information within, you're able to better understand different aspects of your creative process. At times, the professor's delivery can be a little distracting (he has quite a few awkward pauses in the middle of thoughts, and uses the phrase, "right?" a little too unconsciously). I also found some of the lecture material difficult to connect in a practical sense. Some aspects of the design, play, experience model could use better examples in lecture to make the points more concrete. It is a deep model, and they do in fact point you to a whitepaper published on it so there is that, but just for the sake of the lessons; the examples need better explanation. The quizzes were easy, but challenging in the wrong way. Often, questions are posed that weren't ever directly answered in lecture or the materials, and sometimes they are worded in ways that make it difficult to pinpoint what they are looking for. It would be nice to see student responses to the free-response questions make a comeback in future lessons or at least know that they could possibly carry into the material used to teach the next incoming class. The assignments follow a logical progression, and again are supplemented with great materials. The review system is a little wonky. I've posted in the boards about this. They need to make the criteria more clear. The community activity is pretty low. I'm not sure how this can be addressed, but overall this is a great course and perfect second stop on the journey towards the Game Design and Development specialization.

This course while provides good theoretical and supplementary information and theoretical knowledge on how to include mechanics and design a game using design documents and prototypes, I personally feel that some of the technical skill gaps should be accounted for via taking another course - Game Development for Modern Systems - first before taking the Game Design course. There's an assignment that required to produce a prototype, and the Introduction to Game Development course covers very specific recipes using the Unity 3D game engine. This knowledge and skill information are not sufficient to help the developer-in-training to self-develop, translating the specific mechanics the person has in-mind into a self-sufficient developed prototype. It would be great if a separate course or project module were to provide sufficient sandbox-ing and experimental ground to be flex their creativity onto their programming skills, and use that as a springboard onto the prototype game submission. Overall, this course does cover sufficient ground for students to be curious enough to explore different game genres and learn the creative process behind such developments.

Great framework for game design. Got me focusing on a lot of things that I hadn't considered previously. I originally felt it started kind of slow, but that is how any idea starts. It needs to go through all of the steps necessary to make it a reality and Casey O'Donnell is great at teaching the process. Recommended

Great course!

Thought I wouldn't use the stuff that I learned in the videos at first, but as I started working on my own projects, I realised it was very important knowledge for a game developer.

Excellent course, it was sure difficult at the beginning but be patient, at the end you will be amazed of the amount of game design skills you've learned! Thanks a lot professor O'Donnell!

The course itself is nice, but everything about the peer-graded assignments for weeks 2-4 just doesn't work.

Good course, but the weekly projects are very open-ended to peer discretion. I did what I was supposed to do for the final project, but got a 68% for whatever reason (no one commented any feedback). Most peers don't understand the assignments.

The hours required for the assignments is well above the 2 hours stated. Also, there is no required comments on feedback, which can be very frustrating.

Otherwise, the material is interesting, and well presented.

This lecturer is really annoying, ... ...

...

..., right?

No seriously, the majority of the material seems quite obvious and grading rules of the submissions are so unclear ("Wow, that was amazing!"). Moreover, the pacing of the submission feels unbalanced. A game design document made in a week? o_O

It is unfortunate, but this course is terrible. The fact that the next course in the series is taught by the same instructor is the reason I will not be completing the specialization. I skipped ahead and completed "Game Development for Modern Platforms" instead, which I recommend.

The reason for my strong feelings is the lack of real, practical content. The primary advice of the lecturer is "Well, it's also important that you think about this...". What I would desire instead is: "The greatest minds in game design have thought about this and this is what they've come up with so far."

This content exists and is out there. For instance, the director of Super Mario World has clearly explained his 4-step procedure for designing some of the best levels in gaming (you can find this on Youtube). The creator of "Crypt of the Necrodancer" has clearly explained exactly how he chooses which of his game design ideas to pursue (based on the amount and quality of the "hooks").

These practical methods that we can learn from and apply is what I would want from a course like this, but none of this type of content exists here.

This course wasted my time. I completed it because I'm not a quitter, but I won't do another course in this style.

Outdated material and it's hard to keep with the trainer.

An exceptionally informative course that covers the more intricate principles behind the actual design of a game (not to be confused with the more technical aspects of development). From brainstorming ideas to developing a concept to actually testing your game before release, this touches on the more difficult thought processes that one may not learn by simply picking up a game engine and learning how to build a game from the ground up. Couple the concepts learned here with the technical skills from the game development courses (or your own technical experience and knowledge), and you'll be much better equipped to make a solid, marketable product.

This course is amazing, it confronts you with questions regarding game design and forces you to find creative answers, all of this while getting your hands dirty! You'll think of the game as a pitch, then its story, then the whole thing as precisely and accurately as possible and, finally, you'll be tasked to prototype a part of it! It's an invaluable experience, and Casey O'Donnell does a really good job with the videos. There's only one question left: why aren't you taking this course yet???

The concepts are good and important, writing the assignments was not so easy :)

It feels like there is a missing link between the concepts & the writing the documents.

For example -the last exercise (prototype) was not good at all for most people I checked (including myself?).

On a secondary importance level: some of the questions/answers are hard to understand or related to extras (movies, for example) I did not I need to see, so it was a bit frustrating.

This course was a little stressful, but it seriously pays off. The instructor was excellent, he explains everything clearly and gave us quizzes and projects not only to do, but to really learn from. He discusses subjects that really are worth thinking about, if you are considering becoming a Game Designer. I highly recommend this course for avid learners and those that would love to work hands-on on projects that concern Game Design.

Pros: Good lectures. The professor (Casey) provided a lot of interesting readings to supplement the discussions. Some of them were a bit on the scholarly side, but overall surprisingly interesting and informative. I also watched the documentary about indie game designers (Indie Game: The Movie) during this course and found it very helpful. Cons: I wish the quiz questions had explanations of why something was right or wrong.

Teaching style a little loose for me, but man did he make me work on my assignments. The information is valuable and the references are beneficial. My take-away from attending this course gives a good base on how to think about a game and set things up properly from the start. No quick short cuts here. Just good old fashion hard work and how to approach things logically to get things done constructively and productively.

I wanted to take these courses to supplement my own university's Game Focus in Computer Science curriculum, and I got even more than I'd hoped for. This course is the perfect introduction to key game design concepts that most universities don't teach (as opposed to pure programming), and I'm certain that my ventures into game development as a career will be much smoother thanks to this course.

I think the course is well-structured, and it contains a lot of useful materials, I really liked it.

At the same time, I think, while it's easy to go through the course quickly and answer the questions, if the one is really interested in the topic, they need much more time than the description mentioned to read all the articles, to learn from them by applying them at work/in practice.

This course covers everything you need to know about planning and designing your game. Don't be afraid to think big and even if your aren't sure about a game idea you have write it down and keep coming back to it. My capstone project was based on my design from this part of the course after many iterations of the idea and my game came out great.