Basics of Game Design is for anyone wanting to become a professional game designer. Focusing on creating the game mechanics for data-driven games, it covers role-playing, real-time strategy, first-person shooter, simulation, and other games. Written by a 25-year veteran of the game industry, the guide offers detailed explanations of how to design t

To create a great video game, you must start with a solid game design: A well-designed game is easier to build, more entertaining, and has a better chance of succeeding in the marketplace. Here to teach you the essential skills of player-centric game design is one of the industry’s leading authorities, who offers a first-hand look into the process, from initial concept to final tuning. Now in its second edition, this updated classic reference by Ernest Adams offers a complete and practical approach to game design, and includes material on concept development, gameplay design, core mechanics, user interfaces, storytelling, and balancing. In an easy-to-follow approach, Adams analyzes the specific design challenges of all the major game genres and shows you how to apply the principles of game design to each one. You’ll learn how to: Define the challenges and actions at the heart of the gameplay. Write a high-concept document, a treatment, and a full design script. Understand the essentials of user interface design and how to define a game’s look and feel. Design for a variety of input mechanisms, including the Wii controller and multi-touch iPhone. Construct a game’s core mechanics and flow of resources (money, points, ammunition, and more). Develop appealing stories, game characters, and worlds that players will want to visit, including persistent worlds. Work on design problems with engaging end-of-chapter exercises, design worksheets, and case studies. Make your game accessible to broader audiences such as children, adult women, people with disabilities, and casual players. “Ernest Adams provides encyclopedic coverage of process and design issues for every aspect of game design, expressed as practical lessons that can be immediately applied to a design in-progress. He offers the best framework I’ve seen for thinking about the relationships between core mechanics, gameplay, and player—one that I’ve found useful for both teaching and research.” — Michael Mateas, University of California at Santa Cruz, co-creator of Façade

Game Design Foundations, Second Edition covers how to design the game from the important opening sentence, the “One Pager” document, the Executive Summary and Game Proposal, the Character Document to the Game Design Document. The book describes game genres, where game ideas come from, game research, innovation in gaming, important gaming principles such as game mechanics, game balancing, AI, path finding and game tiers. The basics of programming, level designing, and film scriptwriting are explained by example. Each chapter has exercises to hone in on the newly learned designer skills that will display your work as a game designer and your knowledge in the game industry.

Master the craft of game design so you can create that elusive combination of challenge, competition, and interaction that players seek. This design workshop begins with an examination of the fundamental elements of game design; then puts you to work in prototyping, playtesting and redesigning your own games with exercises that teach essential design skills. Workshop exercises require no background in programming or artwork, releasing you from the intricacies of electronic game production, so you can develop a working understanding of the essentials of game design.

The play-focused, step-by-step guide to creating great game designs This book offers a play-focused, process-oriented approach for designing games people will love to play. Drawing on a combined 35 years of design and teaching experience, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp link the concepts and elements of play to the practical tasks of game design. Using full-color examples, they reveal how real game designers think and work, and illuminate the amazing expressive potential of great game design. Focusing on practical details, this book guides you from idea to prototype to playtest and fully realized design. You’ll walk through conceiving and creating a game’s inner workings, including its core actions, themes, and especially its play experience. Step by step, you’ll assemble every component of your “videogame,” creating practically every kind of play: from cooperative to competitive, from chance-based to role-playing, and everything in between. Macklin and Sharp believe that games are for everyone, and game design is an exciting art form with a nearly unlimited array of styles, forms, and messages. Cutting across traditional platform and genre boundaries, they help you find inspiration wherever it exists. Games, Design and Play is for all game design students, and for beginning-to-intermediate-level game professionals, especially independent game designers. Bridging the gaps between imagination and production, it will help you craft outstanding designs for incredible play experiences! Coverage includes: Understanding core elements of play design: actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, and players Mastering “tools” such as constraint, interaction, goals, challenges, strategy, chance, decision, storytelling, and context Comparing types of play and player experiences Considering the demands videogames make on players Establishing a game’s design values Creating design documents, schematics, and tracking spreadsheets Collaborating in teams on a shared design vision Brainstorming and conceptualizing designs Using prototypes to realize and playtest designs Improving designs by making the most of playtesting feedback Knowing when a design is ready for production Learning the rules so you can break them!

You too can learn to design and develop classic arcade video games like Pong, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Scramble. Collision detection, extra lives, power ups, and countless other essential design elements were invented by the mostly anonymous designers at the early pioneering companies that produced these great games. In this book you’ll go step by step, using modern, free software tools such as Unity to create five games in the classic style, inspired by retro favorites like: Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Scramble, and Pac-Man. All the source code, art, and sound sources for the projects are available on the companion files. You'll discover the fun of making your own games, putting in your own color graphics, adjusting the scoring, coding the AI, and creating the sound effects. You'll gain a deep understanding of the roots of modern video game design: the classics of the ’70s and ’80s. Features: Uses Unity, C#, Blender, GIMP, and Audacity to make five fun classic games 4-color throughout with companion files that include source code, art, and full projects (also available for downloading from the publisher by emailing proof of purchase to info@merclearning.com) Includes historical anecdotes direct from one of the fabled Atari coin-op programmers Detailed step-by-step instructions, dozens of exercises, and rules of classic game design Contains unique insights on applying classic game design concepts to modern games.

An introduction to the basic concepts of game design, focusing on techniques used in commercial game production. This textbook by a well-known game designer introduces the basics of game design, covering tools and techniques used by practitioners in commercial game production. It presents a model for analyzing game design in terms of three interconnected levels—mechanics and systems, gameplay, and player experience—and explains how novice game designers can use these three levels as a framework to guide their design process. The text is notable for emphasizing models and vocabulary used in industry practice and focusing on the design of games as dynamic systems of gameplay. The book first introduces the core model and framework for analyzing and designing games. It then discusses the three levels in detail, explaining player experience and identifying design goals; introducing low-level structural analysis of gameplay in terms of basic mechanics; describing how mechanics build up into systems; and presenting concepts for understanding gameplay, defined as the dynamic behavior of players when they interact with mechanics and systems. Finally, the book offers students advice on creating game prototypes using an iterative, user-centered process. Each chapter offers a set of exercises for individuals and design challenges for groups.

You understand the basic concepts of game design: gameplay, user interfaces, core mechanics, character design, and storytelling. Now you want to know how to apply them to the role-playing game genre. This focused guide gives you exactly what you need. It walks you through the process of designing for the role-playing game genre and shows you how to use the right techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your players.

Videogames have risen in popularity in recent decades and continue to entertain many all over the world. As game design and development becomes more accessible to those outside of the industry, their uses and impacts are further expanded. Games have been developed for medical, educational, business, and many more applications. While games have many beneficial applications, many challenges exist in current development processes as well as some of their impacts on society. It is essential to investigate the current trends in the design and development of games as well as the opportunities and challenges presented in their usage and social impact. The Research Anthology on Game Design, Development, Usage, and Social Impact discusses the emerging developments, opportunities, and challenges that are found within the design, development, usage, and impact of gaming. It presents a comprehensive collection of the recent research, theories, case studies, and more within the area. Covering topics such as academic game creation, gaming experience, and violence in gaming, this major reference work is a dynamic resource for game developers, instructional designers, educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, students of higher education, librarians, government officials, business leaders and executives, researchers, and academicians.

This book presents a much-needed framework for the critical examination of miniatures games and their design. It provides the reader with both a conceptual model for understanding how these games work as well as a toolbox of mechanical approaches to achieving a range of design outcomes and assessing the fit of any given approach within a specific design. Though dating back to the 1820s, tabletop miniatures games have been little explored critically and lack a conceptual vocabulary for their discussion. Active practitioners in the miniature games design community, Glenn Ford and Mike Hutchinson explore what defines these games, proposing the term ‘non-discrete miniatures games’ to encapsulate the essence of these open and immersive hobby gaming experiences. Discarding the term ‘wargame’, they argue against limiting conceptions of these games to direct armed conflict, and champion their diverse narrative potential. The book provides a fresh conceptual framework for miniatures games, abstracting the concepts of positioning and moving markers non-discretely across scale-modelled environments into inclusive and generalised terminology, untethering them from their roots as military simulations and providing the foundations for a fresh consideration of miniatures games design. Written for game designers, and with a foreword by Gav Thorpe, The Fundamentals of Tabletop Miniatures Game Design is a handbook for those that wish to design better miniatures games.