Games Design

Join our Games Design and Development course in Nottingham and build the technical and creative skills needed to design engaging, playable games.

You’ll focus on gameplay design, level design and player experience. You’ll learn how to plan and build game scenarios, balancing challenge, difficulty and progression. Using industry-standard tools, including Blueprint systems, you’ll develop playable projects from concept through to delivery.

The course is delivered through practical workshops, projects and collaborative activity. You’ll work with students across Games Art, Animation and Visual Effects, gaining experience of real production pipelines and team-based development.

You’ll also have the option to shape your studies through a range of optional modules, alongside our School-wide CoLab module.

Key features:

• Focus on gameplay, level design and player experience

• Practical development using industry-standard tools and engines

• Collaborative projects across games, animation and VFX

• Opportunities to build a professional portfolio and showreel

You’ll be based in our Design & Digital Arts Building, with access to specialist facilities including virtual production, in-camera VFX and dedicated studio spaces.

You’ll graduate prepared for roles such as gameplay designer, level designer, programmer, technical artist, UX/UI designer or AR/VR developer within the games and creative industries.

Course Modules

[Year one]

• Introducing Gameplay (40 credit points)

• Games Studies (20 credit points)

• Introducing 3D digital art (20 credit points)

• Programming Gameplay (40 credit points)

[Year two]

• System and Level Design (40 credit points)

• Games Design Studio (40 credit points)

• CoLab: Research, Exploration and Risk-taking (20 credit points)

• Optional module.
  You will also choose one optional 20-credit module from:

• 3D Materials and Exploration

• Storyboarding

• Exploring Creative Coding

• Performance for Motion Capture

• Sound Art & Design

• Open-source 3D Art

• Tabletop Game Development

• Interactive Narrative

Optional Placement Year (Sandwich)*
We have an option for all of our students to undertake a placement year (Sandwich) and allow you to decide whether this is right for you once you have completed years 1 and 2 of your course. This time spent working in industry provides our students with crucial work experience, which is highly prized and much sought after by employers upon graduation. If you are successful in securing a placement you will have the chance to gain an additional Certificate or Diploma in Professional Practice, dependent on duration.

If you choose to take the sandwich route option, you will still need to apply for this course with the full-time UCAS code.

[Final year]

• Games Design Project (60 credit points)

• Screen Arts Collaboration (40 credit points)

• Games Entrepreneurship (20 credit points)

https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/art-and-design/ug/bsc-hons-games-design#module-information