You understand the basic concepts of game design: gameplay, user interfaces, core mechanics, character design, and storytelling. Now you want to know how to apply them to the sports game genre. This focused guide gives you exactly what you need. It walks you through the process of designing for the sports game genre and shows you how to use the right techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your players.

To create a great video game, you must start with a solid game design: A well-designed game is easier to build, more entertaining, and has a better chance of succeeding in the marketplace. Here to teach you the essential skills of player-centric game design is one of the industry’s leading authorities, who offers a first-hand look into the process, from initial concept to final tuning. Now in its second edition, this updated classic reference by Ernest Adams offers a complete and practical approach to game design, and includes material on concept development, gameplay design, core mechanics, user interfaces, storytelling, and balancing. In an easy-to-follow approach, Adams analyzes the specific design challenges of all the major game genres and shows you how to apply the principles of game design to each one. You’ll learn how to: Define the challenges and actions at the heart of the gameplay. Write a high-concept document, a treatment, and a full design script. Understand the essentials of user interface design and how to define a game’s look and feel. Design for a variety of input mechanisms, including the Wii controller and multi-touch iPhone. Construct a game’s core mechanics and flow of resources (money, points, ammunition, and more). Develop appealing stories, game characters, and worlds that players will want to visit, including persistent worlds. Work on design problems with engaging end-of-chapter exercises, design worksheets, and case studies. Make your game accessible to broader audiences such as children, adult women, people with disabilities, and casual players. “Ernest Adams provides encyclopedic coverage of process and design issues for every aspect of game design, expressed as practical lessons that can be immediately applied to a design in-progress. He offers the best framework I’ve seen for thinking about the relationships between core mechanics, gameplay, and player—one that I’ve found useful for both teaching and research.” — Michael Mateas, University of California at Santa Cruz, co-creator of Façade

An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance. Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.

You understand the basic concepts of game design: gameplay, user interfaces, core mechanics, character design, and storytelling. Now you want to know how to apply them to the sports game genre. This focused guide gives you exactly what you need. It walks you through the process of designing for the sports game genre and shows you how to use the right techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your players.

The Art of Game Design guides you through the design process step-by-step, helping you to develop new and innovative games that will be played again and again. It explains the fundamental principles of game design and demonstrates how tactics used in classic board, card and athletic games also work in top-quality video games. Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible, and award-winning author Jesse Schell presents over 100 sets of questions to ask yourself as you build, play and change your game until you finalise your design. This latest third edition includes examples from new VR and AR platforms as well as from modern games such as Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us, Free to Play games, hybrid games, transformational games, and more. Whatever your role in video game development an understanding of the principles of game design will make you better at what you do. For over 10 years this book has provided inspiration and guidance to budding and experienced game designers - helping to make better games faster.

Understanding games--whether computer games, card games, board games, or sports--by analyzing certain common traits. Characteristics of Games offers a new way to understand games: by focusing on certain traits--including number of players, rules, degrees of luck and skill needed, and reward/effort ratio--and using these characteristics as basic points of comparison and analysis. These issues are often discussed by game players and designers but seldom written about in any formal way. This book fills that gap. By emphasizing these player-centric basic concepts, the book provides a framework for game analysis from the viewpoint of a game designer. The book shows what all genres of games--board games, card games, computer games, and sports--have to teach each other. Today's game designers may find solutions to design problems when they look at classic games that have evolved over years of playing.

You understand the basic concepts of game design: gameplay, user interfaces, core mechanics, character design, and storytelling. Now you want to know how to apply them to the action and arcade genre. This focused guide gives you exactly what you need. It walks you through the process of designing for the action and arcade genre and shows you how to use the right techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your players.