Game Design

Build the world instead of playing in it.

You've spent years inside other people's games. This is where you learn to make your own. On our free game design programmes, you'll go from an idea to something playable: designing characters, building worlds, writing the story that holds it together, and learning the coding and technical side that makes it run. You'll find out how games are actually put together as products, the design decisions, the testing, the reasons some things feel good to play and others don't.

Gaming is one of the biggest creative industries in the country and one of the hardest to get into if you don't know anyone in it. That's exactly why we teach it. You'll leave with work you can show, and a clearer idea of whether design, art, code or narrative is your route in.

Game Design

Coding

Learn to make a game actually run, the logic behind movement, collisions, scoring, and why a jump feels good in one game and floaty in another. You'll work in a real game engine and write real code, starting from nothing if that's where you're starting from. Coding is the skill on this page that opens the most doors, and not all of them are in games.

Designing

Game design is the thinking part: what the player does, why they keep doing it, and how a world and a story hold together around them. You'll learn level design, mechanics, character and world-building, and how to test something on other people and change it when it doesn't land. Being good at games isn't the same as being good at designing them, this is where you find out which one you are.

2D & 3D

Learn to build what the player actually sees; sprites, environments, characters and assets, in both 2D and 3D. You'll work with industry tools to model, texture and animate, and learn how art direction gives a game its feel long before anyone reads a word of story. These skills travel: the same work sits behind film, animation, advertising and everything else on a screen.

Become a YxngStar

A YxngStar is what we call a young person who's part of Sirlute, not a student on a course, but someone in the community for good. Sign up once and you get free access to our studios and equipment, a place on our programmes across music, fashion, multimedia and game design, and a mentor who knows your name and what you're working towards. You'll get a personal development plan tailored to you and at least 12 months of support after any programme ends, so you always know what's next.

Plenty of our YxngStars have gone from turning up to a first session to leading them; volunteers become young leaders, young leaders become paid staff. It costs nothing, and it doesn't expire.

Bring Sirlute to your young people.

We deliver commissioned programmes for schools, colleges, pupil referral units, youth offending teams, local authorities and voluntary sector organisations across London. You know which young people need it. We design and deliver the programme at our studios in East London or in partnership with your setting.

Our programmes are mapped to the Gatsby Benchmarks for good career guidance, so what we deliver counts towards your own careers provision rather than sitting alongside it.

Get in touch for pricing.

teacher joseph (joe) whitmore game design to childen