Practical Game Design

Terms of engagement

Before you begin thinking about designing, deploying, and running a live game, you ought to familiarize yourself with a large set of keywords and abbreviations used to describe various parts of the business. At first, these terms may seem a bit unwieldy, yet common language is essential when speaking about increasingly complex and fine-tuned products driven by dozens of people and hundreds of moving parts.

The majority of the list is dedicated to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are the metrics used to evaluate the performance of the game. KPIs often revolve around financial data, marketing performance, as well as the current size, health, and the overall trends governing your player base.

We’ll now unpack several ...