Game designers are the artists of the gaming industry, responsible for building visually and sonically immersive worlds, creating compelling stories and characters, and establishing rules and level designs to ensure challenging gameplay. As gaming has grown into a massive industry with over $100 billion in global revenues in 2020, creative and unique video game design has become incredibly important to helping games stand out in a crowded market.

Game design is an essential part of the broader process of video game development, but it is distinct from the technical work of coding and game programming as well as the product development and marketing work required to bring the game to store shelves. By contrast, video game design is more closely related to the world of art, relying on multimedia design and animation skills more than programming. At the same time, professional designers typically rely on specialized software and gaming engines such as Unity to bring their vision of interactive storytelling to life.

As the gaming industry has grown and games themselves become increasingly sophisticated, video game design and development has become an incredibly popular career path. After all, what could be more fun than making video games for a living?

Of course, this popularity means that this is also a very competitive field, and aspiring game designers need a high level of art and design talent as well as experience with general-purpose programming languages like C# and game engines such as Unity to land the jobs they want.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, multimedia artists and animators - including those in the video game industry - earned a median annual salary of $75,270 in 2019, and typically have at least a bachelor’s degree in computer graphics, art, or a related field.

Yes! Coursera has a wide range of courses available in computer science as well as art and graphic design, as well as courses and Specializations spanning multiple courses focused specifically on teaching video game design. You can learn from top-ranked schools like California Institute of the Arts, Michigan State University, and the University of Colorado, all on a flexible schedule and for a lower tuition than on-campus students. You can even take a Specialization from Unity to help prepare for the Unity Certified Programmer Exam, a valuable career credential in the use of this popular gaming engine.