Fundamentals of Action and Arcade Game Design

Game Features

Action games provide a good field in which to study many features also found in other genres because the simplicity of action games means that the issues aren’t obscured by other considerations. Action games tend to set simple, obvious goals and offer clear, direct ways to reach them (although the goals may be difficult to achieve).

Although 2D action games are no longer the state of the art technically, if you are a student, you will probably be asked to build a simple 2D action game as your first project. This is a great place to start, providing you with practice using—and a way to demonstrate your grasp of—the fundamentals of game design. There are free tools that let you easily build small 2D action games with little programming, ...