Fundamentals of Game Design - Softcover

Adams, Ernest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0321643372 ISBN 13: 9780321643377

Publisher: New Riders, 2009

Synopsis

New Riders Publishing

About this title

From the Author:

Our book has been adopted as at textbook at MIT, Georgia Tech, Cornell University, Rensselaer Polytechnic, and numerous other institutions around the world.

Fundamentals of Game Design is an updated edition of our earlier work, Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. This version contains so much new material that Prentice Hall gave it a new title. The earlier book caught on as a textbook, so in this one we have added more features to help instructors and students. It now has multiple choice questions and exercises at the end of every chapter. We've also kept the worksheets of questions to ask yourself about your design, which were a popular feature of the older work. In fact, we put in so much new stuff that we had to move two of the chapters from the old book (Online Games and The Future of Gaming) onto the new Companion Website at Prentice Hall.

Fundamentals is more rigorous than Rollings and Adams was, and more comprehensive. It now includes more formal definitions of such important concepts as gameplay, core mechanics, interaction models, and the storytelling engine. We have also increased our emphasis on design process, with more how-to information than the earlier book had. We've written four new chapters, a glossary, and an appendix, and expanded our discussion in a number of places.

Here are the names of the new chapters:

- Design Components and Processes. We break the game into key components, and propose a process for doing game design based on current industry practice.

- Creative and Expressive Play. The previous book only touched upon these important aspects of video gaming in the context of other things. We now give them a chapter to themselves.

- Core Mechanics. In Rollings and Adams we had one chapter on mechanics, called The Internal Economy of Games and Game Balancing. We've split it into two: one called Core Mechanics and one called Game Balancing. This time we go into much more detail about what mechanics are and how to design them. The balancing chapter is also longer.

- General Principles of Level Design. This was an area that we just didn't have time to address in the previous book. Level design is a critically important part of the job, and though we can't cover everything, we now provide a solid grounding in the basics.

- Appendix: Designing to Appeal to Particular Groups. We added this to cover a number of issues that designers ought to know about choosing a target audience: men and women, adults and children, girls and boys, and how to make your game more accessible to people with impairments of various kinds.

From the Back Cover:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: New Riders
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0321643372
• ISBN 13: 9780321643377
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 700