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This in-depth resource teaches you to craft mechanics that generate challenging, enjoyable, and well-balanced gameplay. You’ll discover at what stages to prototype, test, and implement mechanics in games and learn how to visualize and simulate game mechanics in order to design better games. Along the way, you’ll practice what you’ve learned with hands-on lessons. A free downloadable simulation tool developed by Joris Dormans is also available in order to follow along with exercises in the book in an easy-to-use graphical environment. In Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, you’ll learn how to: * Design and balance game mechanics to create emergent gameplay before you write a single ...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, TIDSE 2006, held in Darmstadt, Germany in December 2006. It contains 37 papers that cover a broad spectrum, from conceptual ideas, theories, and technological questions, to best practice examples in the different storytelling application domains, with a focus on entertainment and games.
In Advanced Game Design , pioneering game designer and instructor Michael Sellers situates game design practices in a strong theoretical framework of systems thinking, enabling designers to think more deeply and clearly about their work, so they can produce better, more engaging games for any device or platform. Sellers offers a deep unifying framework in which practical game design best practices and proven systems thinking theory reinforce each other, helping game designers understand what they are trying to accomplish and the best ways to achieve it. Drawing on 20+ years of experience designing games, launching game studios, and teaching game design, Sellers explains: What games are, and ...
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 shooter games genre. This focused guides gives you exactly what you need. It walks you through the process of designing for the shooter game genre and shows you how to use the right techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your players.
This book presents the most up-to-date coverage of procedural content generation (PCG) for games, specifically the procedural generation of levels, landscapes, items, rules, quests, or other types of content. Each chapter explains an algorithm type or domain, including fractal methods, grammar-based methods, search-based and evolutionary methods, constraint-based methods, and narrative, terrain, and dungeon generation. The authors are active academic researchers and game developers, and the book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students of courses on games and creativity; game developers who want to learn new methods for content generation; and researchers in related areas of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence.
This book surveys current and future approaches to generating video game content with machine learning or Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning (PCGML). Machine learning is having a major impact on many industries, including the video game industry. PCGML addresses the use of computers to generate new types of content for video games (game levels, quests, characters, etc.) by learning from existing content. The authors illustrate how PCGML is poised to transform the video games industry and provide the first ever beginner-focused guide to PCGML. This book features an accessible introduction to machine learning topics, and readers will gain a broad understanding of currently employed PCGML approaches in academia and industry. The authors provide guidance on how best to set up a PCGML project and identify open problems appropriate for a research project or thesis. This book is written with machine learning and games novices in mind and includes discussions of practical and ethical considerations along with resources and guidance for starting a new PCGML project.
How the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean; with examples ranging from Papers, Please to Dys4ia. In How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers two questions: What are the fundamental ways that games work? And how can games be about something? Wardrip-Fruin argues that the two issues are related. Bridging formalist and culturally engaged approaches, he shows how the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean. Wardrip-Fruin proposes that games work at a fundamental level on which their mechanics depend: operational logics. Games are about things because they use play to address topics; they do this through pl...
Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible. Written by one of the world's top game designers, The Art of Game Design presents 100+ sets of questions, or different lenses, for viewing a game’s design, encompassing diverse fields such as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, puzzle design, and anthropology. This Second Edition of a Game Developer Front Line Award winner: Describes the deepest and most fundamental principles of game design Demonstrates how tactics used in board, card, and athletic games also work in top-quality video games Contains valuable insight from Jesse Schell, the former chair of the International Game Developers Association and award-winning designer of Disney online games The Art of Game Design, Second Edition gives readers useful perspectives on how to make better game designs faster. It provides practical instruction on creating world-class games that will be played again and again.
A definitive guide to contemporary video game studies, this second edition has been fully revised and updated to address the ongoing theoretical and methodological development of game studies. Expertly compiled by well-known video game scholars Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, the Companion includes comprehensive and interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing video games, new perspectives on video games both as an art form and cultural phenomenon, explorations of the technical and creative dimensions of video games, and accounts of the political, social, and cultural dynamics of video games. Brand new to this second edition are chapters examining topics such as preservation; au...
Upon its 1990 NES release, Super Mario Bros. 3 flew in on the P-wings of critical raves, intense popular demand, and the most sophisticated marketing campaign Nintendo of America had ever attempted. Shigeru Miyamoto's ultimate 8-bit platformer lived up to all the hype and elevated Mario from mascot to icon. But what exactly made this game the phenomenon it was? With the help of her friends and family, critics inside and outside the realm of gaming, and former Nintendo of America employees, Alyse Knorr traverses the Mushroom World looking for answers. Along the way, Knorr unearths SMB3's connections to theater and Japanese folklore, investigates her own princess-rescuing impulses, and examines how the game's animal costumes, themed worlds, tight controls, goofy enemies, and memorable music cohere in a game that solidified Mario's conquest of the NES era.