Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

The Anatomy of Game Design

Game design cannot be reduced to a set of discrete instructions and processes. There is no formula that you can follow and produce a perfect game design, ready for your programming team to code into existence. However, you can take advantage of a set of common principles that apply to all successful games, and doing so can save you a fair amount of grunt work. Designing a successful game is not just random chance—although so many other factors besides design influence a game's success that it sometimes seems that way.

The Importance of Game Design

Game design (at least for the computer and console) is a very young field, and there is still much to be discovered. The movie industry and even the advertising industry know ...