I've always been passionate about video games, ever since I was a kid. Yesterday I stumbled on some books that discuss game design and it reminded me that I've always wanted to design video games. However, I'm not a very mathematical person, I failed math in middle school and high school, and as an adult I have limited math knowledge. I've always been interested in making the art of the game, and the story. My question is, can I design and develop games if I have limited math knowledge ?

@rimcomputing

So your question seems to be more about how to develop games rather than just design them. No math skills are necessary for designing games (depending on what kind of game you want to design) or for writing game stories. Start here: https://www.gamedev.net/start/​ to learn about how to get started making games.

@Tom Sloper Thank you very much

Let's get some confusion out of the way first. “Game design” means game-play design, what does a player do when playing? How do they win or loose, what are the obstacles, etc.

Developing a game is about realizing the game design so it becomes actually playable. Depending on the game design this can take different forms, eg for card games and board games you need to construct physical parts. For a computer game, you have to write software that explains to the computer how to present the game to the player and how to react to input from the player.

Finally, please realize that playing a game is a totally different activity from designing or developing one.

As for your question, probably the answer is “it depends.”.

Math can give answers to many questions in a design, so yeah, lots of opportunities to use math. On the other hand, math cannot solve “what is a fun game”, so besides math there is a lot of gut feeling, and trying if things work. There is also a lot of smoke and mirrors in there. The goal is to give the player a convincing experience of how the game works, even if in reality it works in a completely different (and usually much less advanced than a player believes) way. So out of the box thinking and finding innovative solutions to problems a part of games too.

The amount of math that you need also depends on the kind of game that you want to create. For an accurate historic simulation you need more math than for a 2d platform game or an adventure game. As such you may want to try create a few different kinds of games to see what you like.