There's all these lovely threads about games we like to play here... but what about making them? Is anyone here into game design? Want to talk about what you've made/worked on? Anyone have any favorite game engines? What aspects of game design are you interested in?

For me, I've made a couple of wimpy little games in GameMaker (one of them was based entirely off of marching band jokes, lol.) I've also worked on an ongoing, larger-scale gamemaker game that my old school's game design club is working on (graduation kind of took me off the project.) I'm now directing/working on a fairly ambitious project, a 3D game modeled in Blender and coded in XNA, for my college game creation society. The society's also working on a crazy one-week game project, which I'm drawing sprites for. I'm interested in most aspects of design; concept, story, art, graphics, and programming.

I just create my own apps via Net or Face Book . . . .

Just little question and answer sometimes when I got real interested I do something much more complicated. . .

Even though I prefer to write a book than to create a game.

Best things about a game is
1. Accessibility
2. Programming
3. Design
4. Pixel Count
5. Controls (Other offline games are lacking. . . What about girls like me who hate memorizing what key shall be used for hitting something or whatever right?)

Actually I know nothing about programming, but I've always wanted to do something such as create the design of a game. Especially I love to invent and draw monsters or other things for games like fantasy RPG. Alas they've always remained concept arts on sheets of paper, I've never found (and probably I will never find) someone particularly interested on making games to collaborate with.

A game with an interesting and intense design is Shadow of the Colossus imo. It is always a good source of inspiration, especially the Colossi and huge open spaces' concept art.

I'm very interested in game design, but I've never seriously dabbled. I know I'd hate to be a programmer.

For those interested in art design, I'd point you towards the blogs of the Bayonetta designers. Here and here, for example.
I've only seen a couple of them but there's a ton more design stuff discussed there.
Warning: contains images of Bayonetta. Just saying. The designer post on how they sculpted her rear end is probably not something you want to be caught looking at.

(Also in the name of shameless and evil self-promotion, I blogged about a little idea I had for RPGs)

Also on the concept art end: Square Enix put some of the concept art for "The World Ends With You" (aka "It's A Wonderful World") up on DeviantArt. Quite interesting.

Update on my current project: Still modeling things in Blender, but we've changed the engine. We're using Unity now. It's wonderful. It does require some programming knowledge to get scripts working, but even before that, you can make some beautiful terrains very quickly, and it's got a first-person player controller script built in, so you just slap that on the camera and wander around... it's great (and free for non-commercial use)!

Re the "level up" idea, Vagrant-- it's interesting, but I think it needs more limitations. More in the comment I left on the post.