   New and Lost...
  ... to game design. I realized how daunting a challenge it really was a few weeks ago when I picked up Blender.I suppose I'm your typical dude that doesn't really know anything about game design technically, and yet has high hopes of one day designing the next "Halo" or "WoW". Mostly I'm just looking for a place to ask questions and maybe fit into a game design process. I've no real skill in programming or scripting, beyond &#106avascript, PhP, and soon SQL. What I more enjoy is designing the mechanics by which the game will operate - combat systems, character progression, story board - the more creative stuff. Anyone have suggestions on what direction I should head? (I'de post in the Looking for Group section, but I don't really have a niche yet.)Otherwise, I recently downloaded Blender, and found several "bugs" or issues that I haven't been able to work around, such as the "rebound" effect models have when they collide. Terrible if you're going about your business saving the day against the Russians, and you accidently hit the wall. At one point I was launching the ball-character I made what might have equated to hundreds of feet across the screen. I bought a guide for modeling in Blender but it doesn't seem to say anything about that. Any ideas?   
  Probably the wrong forum for Blender discussions. However, your problem of wanting to be a designer without being able to program, I can offer some advice. Firstly anyone can program :P choose a nice API like XNA where making stuff is marginally more simple and just try different stuff, grab a book, read some tutorials.However, if you really don't want to program, there are plenty of things you can be doing. How about making board/card games, it's the same principles and requires the same basic skills as computer games design but with different focuses. Alternatively, write design documents for your ideas. Explain in them, in great detail, how all the levels will work, how the different mechanics will work etc. If your idea is good enough, you can always ask some programmers if they like the idea enough if they'd be willing to help you put it together. Hope that helps :)   ;  Oh, holy crap can do I have hundreds of bits of.... crap - nonsense sometimes, of ideas and such. I've been working on the combat mechanics for a God of War style game for the last few days. I've got several half-finished &#106avascript and PhP-coded games, even a working model for a rudimentary Gauntlet type game. I have considered a board game, though I  suppose I tend to prefer video games more. When I was 14 or 15 I actually designed one. The stuff's probably in a box back home. I've never been much into card games.I have recently worked up the motivation to dip into Blender, but I got frustrated with the issues I ran into. Yeah, I realize this isn't the place for that, so I won't go further. This might be the withdrawals from leaving the underway-inport-underway-inport lifestyle I was leading for a while (I'm in the Navy), but with all the extra time I've felt more motivated to begin working on some of the stuff I was interested in as a teenager.Lastly, I suppose I feel some aversion to bugging people about "joining their group". I'm in no way qualified for a team effort. With that being said, I really don't know how else one gets into game design beyond spending thousands of dollars at a design school and networking from there.   ;  If it's got to be video games and not something more low-tech:Try to find an environment where the technology is already in place - an existing, moddable game with a rich scripting language. Then fit some design of yours into the technical constraints of the engine of that game.Even if your game will eventually need original graphics and sound (e.g. you want to make an action puzzle game about medieval witches, and the original game is a sci-fi RTS), just use the existing graphics, models and sounds as placeholders for everything. The only technology/content creation you should be touching is the scripting.If by doing this you manage to design something that's fun to play, or someone else can at least imagine how it might be fun when they play it, then you stand a decent chance of finding people interested in crafting new major features by more complicated coding/scripting, crafting custom graphics and sound, doing levels, etc.   