Advanced Game Design

CHAPTER 8

DEFINING GAME PARTS

As introduced in Chapter 2, “Designing Systems,” systems are made of parts. In designing a game, defining the parts that make it up is where you encounter the most detail.

This chapter introduces different kinds of parts and dives into the details of how you go about defining and documenting these parts for your game, along with their attributes, values, and behaviors. The result is a set of known quantities that create the looping systems and the overall experience you want for your game.

Getting Down to Parts

Chapter 2 first introduced the idea of systems being made up of parts. These parts create loops between them by their actions. In game terms, parts are where we finally get really specific in the game’s design ...