December 2012
Intermediate to advanced
240 pages
7h 11m
English
book
100 Principles of Game Design
by Wendy Despain, Keyvan Acosta, Liz Canacari-Rose, Michael Deneen, Zach Hiwiller, Jeff Howard, Christina Kadinger, Chris Keeling, Casey Kuczik
Overview
Game designers spend their lives solving extraordinary problems
and facing mind-bending paradoxes. It’s their job to make a
meticulous plan for “spontaneous fun” players will want
to experience over and over again. Pressure is heaped on with
demands for innovation and blockbuster status. So designers find
themselves facing an abyss of problems, pressure, and
possibilities, armed only with their brains and an assortment of
design principles they picked up over years of experience.
For the first time, 100 Principles of Game Design gathers some of
the best of these big ideas into one toolkit. Seasoned designers
will be glad they don’t have to hold it all in their heads
anymore, and beginning design students can use the book to learn
the tools of the trade. When the going gets tough, everyone can
turn to this book for guidance, inspiration, or just to remind them
of what works. Collected from every popular school of thought in
game design, these core principles are organized by theme:
innovation, creation, balancing, and troubleshooting.
• Includes advances from the world’s leading
authorities on game design, some explained by the creators
themselves
• A reference book of finite, individual principles for easy
access, providing a jumping off point for further research
• Principles originating in fields as diverse as
architecture, psychiatry, and economics, but shown here as they
apply to game design
• Richly designed with illustrations and photos, making each
principle easy to understand and memorable
• Timeless approach includes feedback loops, game
mechanics, prototyping, economies of scale, user-centered design,
and much more
Professional designers and instructors at one of the world’s
leading game design institutions lay out the building blocks of
diverse knowledge
required to design even the simplest of games.
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