Introduction to Game Systems Design

Chapter 15

Analyzing Game Data

Up to this point in the book, we have been focusing on making data objects one at a time and then evaluating them individually against other data objects. The next step in understanding a game as a whole is to evaluate all the objects together, whether it’s a small set of 10 objects or tens of thousands of objects. You can do this for data as it is created or with existing game data that is fully complete—or anywhere in between.

There are many ways of viewing and analyzing game data, but this chapter focuses on two methods to provide an introduction. The first method is overview analysis, which involves clues and characteristics of the data setup. The second method is comparison analysis, which involves comparing ...