Java Game Development with LibGDX: From Beginner to Professional

Appendix A: Game Design Documentation

While you will learn many technical and practical aspects of game development as you work through the example projects in this book, it is equally important to have a solid foundation in the theoretical aspects of game design. The first effort to create a framework for these concepts is discussed in a paper published by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek in 2004. ¹ There, they proposed the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework, which provides a useful way to categorize the components of a game. They defined Mechanics as the formal rules of the game, expressed at the level of data structures and algorithms, Dynamics as the interaction between the player and the game mechanics while the ...