Ready to give your design skills a real boost? This eye-opening book helps you explore the design structure behind most of today’s hit video games. You’ll learn principles and practices for crafting games that generate emotionally charged experiences—a combination of elegant game mechanics, compelling fiction, and pace that fully immerses players. In clear and approachable prose, design pro Tynan Sylvester also looks at the day-to-day process necessary to keep your project on track, including how to work with a team, and how to avoid creative dead ends. Packed with examples, this book will change your perception of game design. Create game mechanics to trigger a range of emotions and provide a variety of play Explore several options for combining narrative with interactivity Build interactions that let multiplayer gamers get into each other’s heads Motivate players through rewards that align with the rest of the game Establish a metaphor vocabulary to help players learn which design aspects are game mechanics Plan, test, and analyze your design through iteration rather than deciding everything up front Learn how your game’s market positioning will affect your design

When making games for kids, it’s tempting to simply wing-it on the design. We were all children once, right? The reality is that adults are far removed from the cognitive changes and the motor skill challenges that are the hallmark of the developing child. Designing Games for Children, helps you understand these developmental needs of children and how to effectively apply them to games. Whether you’re a seasoned game designer, a children's media professional, or an instructor teaching the next generation of game designers, Designing Games for Children is the first book dedicated to service the specific needs of children's game designers. This is a hands-on manual of child psychology as it relates to game design and the common challenges designers face. Designing Games for Children is the definitive, comprehensive guide to making great games for kids, featuring: Guidelines and recommendations divided by the most common target audiences – babies and toddlers (0-2), preschoolers (3-5), early elementary students (6-8), and tweens (9-12). Approachable and actionable breakdown of child developmental psychology, including cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development, as it applies to game design Game design insights and guidelines for all aspects of game production, from ideation to marketing

See How to Unobtrusively Incorporate Good Teaching into Your Game's MechanicsLearn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games shows how to embed a tutorial directly into your game design mechanics so that your games naturally and comfortably teach players to have fun. The author deciphers years of research in game studies, education, psychology,

Only by finding and focusing on a core mechanism can you further your pursuit of elegance in strategy game design. Clockwork Game Design is the most functional and directly applicable theory for game design. It details the clockwork game design pattern, which focuses on building around fundamental functionality. You can then use this understanding to prescribe a system for building and refining your rulesets. A game can achieve clarity of purpose by starting with a strong core, then removing elements that conflict with that core while adding elements that support it. Filled with examples and exercises detailing how to put the clockwork game design pattern into use, this book is a must-have manual for designing games. A hands-on, practical book that outlines a very specific approach to designing games Develop the mechanics that make your game great, and limit or remove factors that disrupt the core concept Practice designing games through the featured exercises and illustrations

Join videogame industry veteran Michael Thornton Wyman on a series of detailed, behind-the-scenes tours with the teams that have made some of the most popular and critically acclaimed videogames of the modern era. Drawing on insider's perspectives from a wide variety of teams, learn about the creation of a tiny, independent game project (World of Goo), casual game classics (Diner Dash, Bejeweled Twist), the world's most popular social game (FarmVille) as well as the world's most popular MMORPG (World of Warcraft), PC titles (Half Life 2) to AAA console games (Madden NFL 10), and modern-day masterpieces (Little Big Planet, Rock Band, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves). Hear directly from the creators about how these games were made, and learn from their stories from the trenches of videogames production. This book is an excellent resource for those working directly on game design or production, for those aspiring to work in the field, or for anyone who has wondered how the world's greatest videogames get made.

"This book brings together the diverse and growing community of voices on ethics in gaming and begins to define the field, identify its primary challenges and questions, and establish the current state of the discipline"--Provided by publisher.