Category Archives: Game Design

Balancing a Game with Complex Components

It is easy to want to add more and more complexity to game components.

But with each layer of complexity comes a multiplier of difficulty in balancing. Perfectly balanced game components are not necessarily that interesting, but completely unbalanced components can break your game.

An Example: Weapon Damage

Currently I am working on a ruleset for a table top game.

The theme of the game is tactical spaceship combat. Naturally, the ships have weapons and can attack each other. Each weapon has the following attributes:

Damage applied on hit
Range and possibly variable damage over range
Energy Cost to fire
Accuracy and possibly variable accuracy over range
Ammo or no ammo

First Level of Complexity: Damage and Cost Ratio

The simplest things to balance here would be to find a nice semi linear progression of damage and cost to fire.

Lets say we start with a core weapon, a laser that does 2 damage for every 1 energy. Now any weapon that does more than 2 damage per energy spent would be considered strong and any weapon that does less than that would be considered weak.

Ships that produce more energy would have an advantage to be able to fire their weapons more often.

Second Level of Complexity: Account for Accuracy

But these weapons have an accuracy value as well.

So the damage number is not the real damage number. We have an expected damage number that is the damage times the accuracy percentage.

If say, the accuracy of the laser from above was 75% then the expected damage per shot would be 1.5 damage to 1 energy spent.

We could use this to further balance weapons by bringing up the accuracy of low damage weapons and decreasing the accuracy of high damage weapons so their expected damage is closer to the baseline while still making them feel powerful or weak.

Third Level of Complexity: Ammo Count

Now we enter ammo into the equation.

The game is turn based with a max number of turns per match. Limited ammo would cap a weapons max damage it could apply over the course of the game.

Weapons that do not use ammo would theoretically be able to fire every turn. Their max damage would then be expected damage times the number of turns in the match. This could be adjusted based on if you reasonably expect an engagement in the first couple of turns.

If we have a 10 turn match, our baseline laser weapon that has an expected damage of 1.5 per energy spent would have an expected max damage of around 15 for a game.

To make a balanced high damage, low ammo weapon we would want to get the expected max damage to be roughly 15. An example weapon from the game would be a torpedo weapon that has 2 shots, an accuracy of 50% and does 15 damage per shot. Only being able to fire twice, on average 1 of the 2 shots will hit giving the weapon an expected max damage in line with the baseline weapon.

Greater Complexity: The Rest of the Game

We have an idea of just how the weapons relate to each other in relative power, but we have to balance them in relation to the rest of the game.

The ships have movement and energy generation, the weapons have various fields of fire and we did not even consider the range variable in the analysis above.

We did however simplify the damage, accuracy, and ammo into a single value that could be used to make balancing weapon power easier.

I hope you found this useful in bringing some balance to your own game.

Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.

Using Rewards and Missions

Several of the games that I enjoy have various challenges and missions that come up every so often. They usually involve standard game play and provide some sort of reward.

Occasionally however the challenges encourage you to try techniques or strategies that you may not normally use.

My example here is going to be World of Warships. In World of Warships you basically have 6 ways to deal damage to enemy ships. You can hit them with your main guns, torpedo them, ram them, have your secondary guns deal damage, cause flooding or fire damage through one of the previous methods, or if you are using an aircraft carrier you can have various aircraft attack the enemy ships.

Main guns are the standard way to deal damage and usually the safest. They have the longest range and require a bit of skill at long range so it rewards higher skill play. Torpedoes are super powerful, doing tons of damage in a single hit. But they are short range, can usually only be fired to the sides, and can be dodged pretty easily if you aren’t close. Getting close usually means you are taking a ton of damage from your opponent as you steam towards them. This is just standard game balance. High risk, high reward.

When something high risk like that takes some practice to get right, sometimes you need to add an extra reward to get players to practice it such as a mission or a challenge. For example you get extra in game currency if you sink 5 ships with torpedoes.

This is also true when buffing or nerfing items, guns, or other abilities in games.

If you have a weak item that nobody is using and you give it some more power to make it playable, it is still hard to get players to use an item they have been trained to see as weak. So offering a reward to complete a challenge with it will allow your players to feel good about using it and trying it out again.

If you have an overpowered item and you take its power level down, when players find out they may stop using it even though it is still a viable item. Again you can use the challenge and reward pattern to get more people to use it to at least test its playability.

Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.

Foxhole: A War Simulation Game

Last year I stumbled across a game just as it released on Steam through one of the streamers I occasionally watch on Twitch.
That game was Foxhole and it is awesome.

Quick Summary

Foxhole is a war simulation from a kind of isometric top down perspective. It is an extremely team focused game that ranges from 20 vs 20 to 70 vs 70 games (possibly more in the future). Every weapon, tool, defensive structure, vehicle and round of ammo in the game is created by players (except the pistol and hammer you spawn with). The game is set in a separate world from ours but uses technology from the World War 2 ish era with a conflict of the Wardens vs the Colonials.

You play a single soldier on one side of a conflict in a war that can last anywhere from several days to several weeks. You get to choose your role and what you do for your team whether that is logistics creating and transporting resources, combat engineer building defenses on the front and advancing your lines, scout locating and probing enemy defenses, partisan causing havoc behind enemy lines, front line grunt smashing against enemy defenses to push them back, or any other job you can come up with.

The game goes on until one side captures all of the towns on a map. The campaign is won when one team wins all of the maps.

The Production Cycle

There are 4 basic resources in the game: scrap, components, fuel, and sulfur. There is an additional resource that you get randomly and is used to tech up called tech parts.

Scrap can be gathered with the basic hammer that you spawn with. It turns into Basic Materials, or bmats in game shorthand, and is what the war runs on. You can build quite a lot from the basic materials from rifle and grenades to trucks and pillboxes.

Fuel is what all the vehicles run on. No fuel in your truck, your stuck. This can also be gathered with the basic hammer.

Components require a sledge hammer which requires a little teching up. They turn into Refined Materials, or rmats, and are used to make more advanced vehicles and structures, think tanks and pillboxes that are harder to destroy.

Sulfur is used to create Explosive Material, or emats. This lets you create more advanced ammunition such as artillery, mortar, and tank shells. Because the weapons it makes are more powerful, it is slower to gather so use wisely.

Each of these resources gets mined from a resource node then has to be transported to a refinery (except fuel) to become its useful version. Good luck getting it there without a truck. If your character has too much in his backpack he becomes encumbered and moves super slow. If you get fully encumbered, your character will collapse to the ground after a short sprint and need to recover.

Combat

You do not have a health bar. Individual soldiers are pretty fragile. A couple of rifle shots and you are on the ground either dead or dying. There is some visual indication of damage, if you are close to dying your character will be bloodied up. Also you can be in a bleeding state where little spurts of red come from your character. This means you should find a medic soon or apply a bandage if you have one.

There are 2 main things you fight in Foxhole, other players and static defenses.

The primary static defense is a foxhole (where the game gets its name). Defenses will shoot at you if you come into their visual range. However there are 4 ways of keeping yourself from dying in the meat grinder as you clear them out.

If you are with a squad of players, most defenses can be suppressed. By keeping up a steady stream of fire, either from an automatic weapon or several semi-auto weapons, the defenses rate of fire will drop down to almost zero. Then you run up and throw grenades at it.

If you are alone, you can throw a smoke grenade to obscure the vision of the defense. This will keep it from seeing your and firing at you as you lob your grenades at it.

Another option is long range artillery. Usually a mortar. Using binoculars to find the range and direction of the target, you set your mortar and fire, safely behind your own defenses.

One of the more fun options is using combat vehicles, especially tanks, to roll up and blow holes in the enemy defensive line. Careful though as there are anti-vehicle turrets that will turn your tank into swiss cheese as well as anti-tank mines that can leave you with a busted engine. Always bring some infantry support to scout ahead for you.

Recent Updates

An update this past fall brought water vehicles and features to the game. You can now stage your own D-Day style landings with a swarm of amphibious troop transports or bombard enemy defenses from your gunboat. You can even swim a short distance.

A training ground was added for people to jump in and experiment with movement, building, etc, without impacting the war effort of a team.

Even more recently there have been changes to scouting, watchtowers, and radios with more updates to come.

The development team has been listening closely to the community for feedback on features and improvements and it shows. Catch one of their streams every other Tuesday on Twitch to find out more.

Caveats, Warnings, and Other Thoughts

This game requires some patience. It is designed to last multiple days or weeks. Ten to twenty minutes is not going to do much. Try for longer play sessions.

While there are roles you can perform playing as a solo that will help your team, you will not get much done by your self. It is specifically designed to be a team game and require cooperation for success.

It is best if you can find a group of at least 3-4 people, preferably on a regular basis, to make a bigger impact on the war.

This game is still technically in Alpha/Early Release. It has bugs and is unfinished. But like I mentioned before, the dev team is working hard and listening to community feedback. Also, it plays really well.

The whole cooperation for success aspect of the design is one of the things that makes this game stand out, along with the massive size of the teams. For example, you can’t do much with a tank by yourself. You need at least a driver and a gunner and it is even better when you have a commander sticking out the hatch with binoculars doing some spotting and a group of infantry keeping enemy soldiers with grenades from attacking you from the flank.

I love this game and hope it continues to be successful.

Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.

First Monkey-X Game: Enemies and Collision

Now that the player can move around the screen, let’s give him some enemies to avoid.

Start by adding a collection to hold our enemy characters.

Now we want to modify the Character class just a little so we can have enemy characters and all of them don’t move when the player touches the controls.

Since we are only going to create 1 player character and we are going to be creating multiple enemies, we are going to give the is_player variable a default of ‘False’ so we can make all our enemies by only passing the first parameter.

Now we need to go and change our player creation code to tell the game that it is a player

Make Some Enemies

Now it is time to make some enemies. We are going to start by making a little generator that creates enemies every 3 seconds or so in our OnUpdate method. We also need to initialize our enemies list.

Now when you run this, you should have some little yellow boxes floating across the middle of the screen every 3 seconds.

Randomize the Enemies

Enemies that always come straight down the middle of the screen every 3 seconds are not that exiting. Let’s spice it up and improve our enemy creator code.

We are going to do 4 things. First we want to randomize where the enemies start. Next we want to randomize how fast they are going. We also want to randomize how often they appear. Finally we want to randomize how big they are and what color they are.

Running into enemies

Now that we have some enemies flying around the screen, lets add some code that checks if we ran into one of them or not.

This adds the checks, but right now we don’t have a way to tell the engine to do anything about them.

What we want to do is extend the engine so we can override its OnObjectCollision method. To do this we are going to create a CustomEngine class that extends Fantom Engine. Create a new custom_engine.monkey file and put in the following code.

One of the ways of passing information back and forth with the engine is by setting Tags and Text on the object. In this case we are going to tell the engine that whenever a PLAYER object and an ENEMY object collided, mark the ENEMY object as DESTROYED and make sure it cannot collide with the PLAYER again.

Now we need to go back and add the text to the player and enemy boxes. Also, in our OnUpdate method, we will remove all the enemies that get destroyed.

Now when you run the game, every time your little character runs into one of the little enemy squares, the enemy should disappear.

Now the Game Truly Begins

With collision working, we can start adding projectiles for our hero to stop the enemies before they even touch his little box.

Tutorial Part 6
Tutorial Part 8

First Monkey-X Game: Creating the Player

One of the first things I like to do when making a game is to build the fundamental mechanics in first. In this case it will be the player’s character and the ability to move around the screen.

In order to keep the code clean, we will separate the character out into its own class.

Draw

We will start by adding the character to the game and drawing it in the form of a rectangle. To do this we need to give the Character class a ftObject representing a box. Then we will create a character in the game’s OnCreate method.

We also need to update the OnRender method to tell the engine to draw all of the objects

Now when you run the Main file you should get a black rectangle on a red background.

Pretty basic but that is what we are going for.

Movement

Now that we can see the player, let’s add some controls so they can move around the screen. We will put the handling of the controls in the Character class by giving it an Update method. This way we can keep the code clean. For now let’s use the arrow keys to move our player around.

Now all we need to do is call the character update method from our game’s OnUpdate method and we will have movement.

Run this and you should be able to move your little rectangle around with the arrow keys.

Boundaries

We don’t want the player to lose their character by it flying off the screen, so let’s prevent the player from being able to leave the viewable area.

We will do this by adding some additional checks in the Character class Update method.

Now when you run your code, you should be able to move the box around with the arrow keys but it should never leave the viewable area.

Our next steps will be to add enemies and the ability to shoot them.

Tutorial Part 5
Tutorial Part 7

Game Devs Like You

One of the many things that my studies in success have consistently directed me towards is forming a Mastermind. The word may sound fancy but it is simply the idea of 2 or more people who meet together to share advice and ideas.

In game development especially, a mastermind would be extremely helpful. Sharing resources, pitfalls, and ideas in something so complicated is extremely beneficial to all involved.

So a few months ago I started looking into this a little more seriously. I have not found or formed a mastermind as yet, but I did find an opportunity to join one remotely.

Gamekedo

Gamekedo is a game development club organized by Chris DeLeon. They work mostly in Unity and work together to make games.

The club has monthly dues but for someone just starting out in game development it sounds like a great opportunity (especially if you are interested in Unity).

Game Devs Like You

In addition to the club, Chris also runs the Game Devs Like You podcast in which he interviews people in game development. I have only listened to the first couple episodes so far but they are fantastic. The first episode is with a game dev who is only 12 years old (what’s your excuse?).

It is an encouraging and informative podcast and I will be adding it to my Ultimate List of Game Development Podcasts

If you don’t already have a group to discuss games and game design with, consider looking for one in your area or online.

10 Things Analysis: Texas Hold’em

It’s been a while since I did a game analysis and since Game #3 for 2016 is going to be a card game, I decided to take a look at one of the many card games I enjoy, one that is been around for a while and played worldwide. The game I chose is Poker, specifically the Texas Hold’em style.

How I Know the Game

I had seen some Texas Hold’em played before on TV during the World Series of Poker (WSOP, which incidentally has been going on for the past few weeks), but had never played it myself and didn’t really understand it until a couple years ago.

Some guys at work where having a little home poker tournament and a friend of mine invited me to come play. I didn’t know the rules so he taught me the basic rules and then I proceeded to watch the coverage of the prior 2 years of WSOP on Youtube before the tournament to prepare.

I didn’t do all that well. And although I lasted longer than my friend, I did not have a strategy for how to win.

About 8 months later I happened across a Twitch streamer named Jason Summerville who was streaming poker of all varieties every evening and I began to watch and listen. After a couple months of watching him and about a year after my first time playing Poker, the guys at work scheduled another tournament.

Again I watched WSOP, continued to watch Jason, and played some practice games with a Poker app or 2 on my phone. This time I ended up coming in 2nd place out of about 20 guys after some real close calls. It was often and I am smiling now just thinking about it.

On to Analysis

Many of these things will actually apply to all kinds of Poker but I am mainly looking at the Texas Hold’em, tournament style.

Goal

The goal of the game is simple, win all the chips. In a tournament, typically all the players will start with a similar number of chips and if you lose all of your chips you are out.

Rules

You play the game with a standard deck of playing cards. You can play as long or as short as you want and in a tournament this is usually until one player has all of the chips. The game is played in hands and each hands has several rounds of betting. Whoever wins the hand gets the chips that where bet by the various players.

You can find a more detailed description of the rules here.

Interaction

Players have 2 basic ways to interact with each other. The most obvious is through betting. When you bet it forces your opponents to make a choice of whether to fold (let you win), call (match your bet to continue playing), or reraise (force you into this decision by putting more chips in). Also the size of your bet gives your opponents information about how strong you think your hand is, or how strong you want them to think it is.

The other less obvious methods of interaction is through table talk and nonverbal communication. Good players can read body language fairly well and can even fake body language giving their opponents false information.

Catchup

One of the things about poker is that you can come from behind and win. This is usually done from “doubling up” or doubling the amount of chips you have by going “all in” and betting all of your chips that you will win. However like all catchup features, it has risk. If you lose the hand when going all in, you are out of the game.

Inertia

Each hand has 2 blinds, a big blind and a small blind. These players have to bet certain amounts each hand. This responsibility rotates around the table by one seat after each hand. The blind is also usually the minimum amount of chips you have to raise by if you want to raise. Most tournaments have the blinds increase every so often to move the game towards completion.

Surprise

Poker is full of surprises. This comes with any game that has randomness and hidden information. For Texas Hold’em you are surprised by the cards that are revealed each round and by the cards your opponents have.

Strategy

Despite the randomness inherent in a game like poker, it is full of strategy. How else you several people consistently make a living at it? Most of the strategy comes down to playing the odds and playing the other players. There are books and websites dedicated to how to play poker well. One of the great things about poker is that it is unlikely that you will ever be able to play perfectly.

Fun

There is a ton of fun in poker. Every time you put the pieces together of whether you can beat your opponent or not based on the limited information you have it is awesome. It is like one puzzle after another and can be kinda rewarding.

Flavor

This one is tough. I am not sure that poker has a flavor and that is OK.

A Hook

In a word, money. This is what gets most people into any sort of gambling game to begin with. It is a powerful hook and can lead some people into spending too much money on the game.

Final Thoughts

There is actually an interesting crossover between people who play Poker and people who play Magic the Gathering (like me). And like MTG, Poker is a very fun game and there is a lot of strategy to be found in it. It has most of the elements of our 10 things list and is not surprisingly very popular. If you have never played before, I recommend giving it a shot. Although I will add that you probably should not play for real money (at least not at first and never more than you can afford to lose).

Have fun making games that stay popular like Poker.

Game 3 of 2016 Design Notes

It is now well into July and the 3rd quarter of the year. Game 2, “Drone Tournament” is not finished yet as the multiplayer still needs more work, but I have a schedule to keep.

Since the beginning of the year, I knew I wanted to make a simple card type game this year. I really enjoy many card based games like MTG, Poker, Munchkin, Duelyst, and Cards and Castles and want to begin coming up with ideas in this area.

The Game

The design right now is based around some of the core mechanics from MTG with some of my own flavor and rules tossed in. Additionally even though I have not played Hearthstone directly, I may borrow some of it’s mechanics as well.

Goal

The goal is to reduce your opponents character life total to 0. Pretty straightforward. This will be accomplished through attacking with your various creatures and abilities.

Rules

For this game, the rules need to be spelled out pretty clearly since it can ostensibly be played 100% on paper and no computer is needed. The following rules may change.

Each player chooses a character to represent them in play (those familiar with MTG Commander or EDH this would be like a commander but also like a Planeswalker). This character can be attacked by opponents creatures and targeted by their abilities.

Each player takes a turn that sequences as follows.

Renew Resources – resources that have been used are untapped then you draw a card
Status Effects Happen – any status effects that are on creatures or players apply during this phase
Main Planning – players play new creatures, increase their resources, use abilities, play equipment, and modify creatures during this phase
Combat – players attack with creatures and or their character during this phase
Secondary Planning – same as Main planning
Turn Ends

Again these rules may change a ton.

Interaction

Players can do all sorts of interaction with their opponent by attacking, blocking, and using abilities to disrupt their opponents plan.

Catch Up

The game is not over until it is over. Their will be abilities that can bring a losing player back into the game and some that can help stabilize a losing situation.

Inertia

The steady increase of available resources will unlock the player’s ability to use more powerful creatures and abilities which will bring the game to and end sooner. Considering implementing the Cards and Castles rule that when a deck runs out of cards, the player’s life starts decreasing slowly.

Surprise

Hidden information games always contains surprise. In games like this there are 2 main areas for surprise. First your own deck. You do not know what you will draw each turn and in what order. Second your opponents hand and deck. You do not know what he has planned for you.

Strategy

With deck building, strategy comes into giving yourself a good percentage to draw a sequence of cards that can be used to win the game. This skill can improve over time. With play involving hidden information like this, the strategy becomes making the play that gives you the highest chance to win with the resources that you have available and might become available later.

Fun

I am borrowing the fun from several other games so I expect this game to be fun as well. If the art of game design is to be believed, fun is just problem solving with a playful attitude and a little surprise mixed in certainly helps. This game is all about that.

Flavor

The flavor is sort of going to be borrowed from one of my favorite RPG’s called Geneforge. I plan on asking the creator of the game if I can use the flavor directly but if I can’t I will still use the ideas, just flavor them slightly differently.

A Hook

This one is actually gonna be kinda tough. There are so many TCG’s (Trading Card Games) out there that occasionally I see one and think to myself, “not another one.” But I am also hopeful about some. Regardless, I think the hook will have to be something along the lines of strategy, deck building, and defeating your enemies with your awesome monsters.

Final Thoughts

While I don’t necessarily think this game will be a huge hit, I am excited to try to make a card game with a pile of mechanics that I think might be cool. It’s not a bunch of new stuff, but it is a different mix.

If you can’t think of new things to make, try mixing old things.

Handling Edge Cases – Literally

Game #2 is coming along quite well and as it is getting farther along I am running into certain design decisions. One of these is what to do when a player’s little drone gets to the edge of the map.

Why have a limited map size at all?

If you take a look at 10 things every game needs, you will notice that #3 on that list is the need for Interaction. Limiting the map size keeps a player from just flying away from their opponent for forever and no interaction happening.

What are the options?

After taking another look at Steambirds, they used 2 different approaches between their web version and their iPad version.

In the web version, if you get close to the edge, there are stationary turrets that destroy your little airplane as it flies off the edge. So option 1 is to destroy anybody who flies off the edge.

In the iPad version, the game prevents you from flying off the edge and makes your airplane sort of slow down and turn sharper so that you cannot fly off the edge. So option 2 is bend the movement rules near the edge of the map so that players can’t fly off.

Option 3 that I came up with, and the one I went with, is to allow the player to move outside of the map, but sort of do a 180 degree flip and bring them back at the edge of the map. I borrowed this idea from Star Fox which I spent many hours playing on my old N64.

Why choose that option?

First of all, it is a really easy option to implement. Just check if the next control waypoint is outside of the map and set it to just inside the edge that you crossed.

Second, I don’t like the idea of destroying the player if they go past the edge on a small map like I am using.

Third, I think it will allow for a little extra Strategy (number 7 in our list of 10 things games need) for players to flip around on the edge of the map.

Remember

When you are thinking about how to handle edge cases in a game, consider all of your options then ask yourself which one will make the game better and why.

Keep being awesome and making games.

Book 1 of 2016 Review – The Art of Game Design

I wrote an initial review over the first few chapters of the book earlier this year, then quickly realized with the types of notes I was taking it would take forever to finish the book. Well it took 5 months anyway with everything I had going on. I suspect if I had focused on it bit more I could have finished it in 1 month no problem. This is a very brief set of notes with a thought about every chapter.

Rating 10/10

This book is fantastic. It is essentially 500 pages of great ideas and questions to ask yourself when making a game. This may sound overwhelming and it is a little, but just get 1 or 2 of the ideas at a time. In fact, there is a separate little deck of cards that can be bought (or you can make your own) from the “lenses” in the book. Highly recommend anyone who is interested in games creation, game design, or the game industry read through this book.

Notes and Thoughts

The only way to be a game designer is to design games (and make them). So if you want to be a game designer say “I am a game designer” and go make games.

There are several important skills every game designer can have but the most important is the ability to listen. Not just listening to what people say, but also to their body language and other non verbal communication.

As a designer, you are really designing an experience that the player(s) of the game will have. Then you design a game that will deliver that experience.

Games are made for players. Who is your player? Ofter written as, who is your target demographic?

Even though people usually interact with the game through some sort of interface, the experience you design actually takes place in the player’s mind.

Games are made up of different elements. Only one of those elements is the game’s mechanics. This includes rules of the game and the playing pieces and interactions.

Balancing the game’s mechanics is very important to the experience.

The mechanics of the game support puzzles in a game. By this we mean that there is some sort of problem solving in the game caused by the mechanics.

All games have an interface so you can play them. It is a loop. Player puts inputs into interface, game interprets and gives an output, player interprets the output and gives a new input. The ideal design is to have the interface add to the experience that is being designed.

Interest curves are very important for judging experiences. One of the most effective interest curves is well known and is basically a short period of rising action at the beginning, a small drop in action, then a longer period of rising action to the climax of the story. However the best interest curves are fractals of this curve so that a small arc of the story along this larger interest curve will also follow the same pattern.

Stories are one type of experience. The dream is to have a completely interactive story with open endings. This is both difficult and impractical for now (see this post I wrote about branching explosion of story writing). There is good ways to design story into the game and the book has several good tips.

The game and the story can be merged together with “indirect control.”

Stories and games take place in worlds. Some of the best worlds are those that people actually want to visit and even pretend to visit and translate into other forms of media well.

There are characters in our worlds. We want to create compelling characters.

Worlds contain spaces, we usually call them levels. You can use the design of the spaces to create a better experience through giving visual clues the players may not even notices but react to and follow.

The aesthetics of the world define its look and feel. Sound, art and the technology used to create the world all work together to help get the experience where you want it.

Some games are played with other people. This can sometimes get a little tricky.

Sometimes communities form around games. It is important if you are designing a game where you hope a community will form to build in support for a strong community. The author gives several good suggestions and examples of ways to build a strong community.

Game designers usually work with a team (even if it is only a team of 1 other person). Getting buy in from everyone on the team is super important. Keep communication levels good.

Sometimes the team communicates with documents. Make sure to not let them get stale.

Playtesting is the key to a good game. You can never playtest enough. You need to ask the playtesters: Why, Who, Where, What and How?

The team builds the game with Technology. Technology can be tricky, especially on games that are being developed over a multi year cycle. Choose carefully.

Games usually have a client. By this we mean someone who is financially backing the game.

The designer usually gives a “pitch” to the client to get them to buy-in to the idea of the game. There is a list of tips for how to give a successful pitch.

Most of the time, the client (and you as the designer) want to make a profit from the game. You should spend some time learning the lingo of game sales and figuring out the business model of the game.

Games actually change the people who play them, the book uses the word “transform.” Games can be both good and bad for you.

Because of the affects games can have, game designers have certain responsibilities.

Every game designer has motivation, what’s yours?

The End

Seriously, go get this book and read it. Even if you don’t want to design games, it still has valuable ideas for anyone wanting to get into design or creation of software.