Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design

Front Cover
Addison-Wesley Professional, May 19, 2016 - Computers - 288 pages

The play-focused, step-by-step guide to creating great game designs

This book offers a play-focused, process-oriented approach for designing games people will love to play. Drawing on a combined 35 years of design and teaching experience, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp link the concepts and elements of play to the practical tasks of game design. Using full-color examples, they reveal how real game designers think and work, and illuminate the amazing expressive potential of great game design.

Focusing on practical details, this book guides you from idea to prototype to playtest and fully realized design. You’ll walk through conceiving and creating a game’s inner workings, including its core actions, themes, and especially its play experience. Step by step, you’ll assemble every component of your “videogame,” creating practically every kind of play: from cooperative to competitive, from chance-based to role-playing, and everything in between.

Macklin and Sharp believe that games are for everyone, and game design is an exciting art form with a nearly unlimited array of styles, forms, and messages. Cutting across traditional platform and genre boundaries, they help you find inspiration wherever it exists.

Games, Design and Play is for all game design students, and for beginning-to-intermediate-level game professionals, especially independent game designers. Bridging the gaps between imagination and production, it will help you craft outstanding designs for incredible play experiences!

Coverage includes:

  • Understanding core elements of play design: actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, and players
  • Mastering “tools” such as constraint, interaction, goals, challenges, strategy, chance, decision, storytelling, and context
  • Comparing types of play and player experiences
  • Considering the demands videogames make on players
  • Establishing a game’s design values
  • Creating design documents, schematics, and tracking spreadsheets
  • Collaborating in teams on a shared design vision
  • Brainstorming and conceptualizing designs
  • Using prototypes to realize and playtest designs
  • Improving designs by making the most of playtesting feedback
  • Knowing when a design is ready for production
  • Learning the rules so you can break them!

 

Selected pages

Contents

Contents
Concepts 1 Games Design and Play 2 Basic Game Design Tools 3 The Kinds of Play 4 The Player Experience Part II Process
Concepts
The Player Experience
Process
The Iterative Game Design Process
Design Values
Design Values
Game Design Documentation
Collaboration and Teamwork
Practice 9 Conceptualizing Your Game 10 Prototyping Your Game 11 Playtesting Your Game 12 Evaluating Your Game 13 Moving from Design to ...
Works Cited
Glossary
Index
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design
Colleen Macklin,John Sharp
No preview available - 2016

Common terms and phrases

abstraction anna brainstorm browser game capture cards challenge Chapter character chess collaborative competition complete game complete game prototype concept constraint controllers create decision-making decisions design values designing a game Eric Zimmerman evaluate example explore failure feedback feel Figure focus focused game design document game design process Game Design Tools game development game’s game’s goals gameplay happens ideas important information space interaction interface iterative cycle iterative design iterative game design Jenga Johann Sebastian Joust Joust Killer Queen kind of play look move multiplayer Naomi Netrunner objects onscreen paddle paper prototype Peter Lu physical play experience playable prototype player experience playspace PlayStation playtest Pong production Queers in Love questions role role-playing Route Zero rules schematics score screenshot skill soccer space of possibility story strategy Tale of Tales tasks team members tests thatgamecompany theme things trying Valve Corporation videogames visual

About the author (2016)

Colleen Macklin is a game designer and an Associate Professor in the school of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design, where she has been teaching interaction and game design for over 20 years. Macklin is also founder and co-director of PETLab (Prototyping Education and Technology Lab), a lab that develops games for experimental learning and social engagement. PETLab projects include disaster preparedness games and sports with the Red Cross, the urban activist game Re:Activism and the physical/fiscal sport Budgetball. PETLab has also published game design curricula for the Boys & Girls Club. She is a member of the game design collective Local No. 12, best known for their social card game, the Metagame. Her work has been shown at Come Out and Play, UCLA Art|Sci Center, The Whitney Museum for American Art and Creative Time.

John Sharp is a designer, art historian, curator and educator with over twenty five years of involvement in the creation and study of art and design. He is the Associate Professor of Games and Learning at Parsons The New School for Design. Along with Colleen Macklin, John co-directs PETLab (Prototyping, Education and Technology Lab), a research group focused on games and their design as a form of social discourse. John is also a member of the game design collective Local No. 12 along with Colleen Macklin and Eric Zimmerman (Arts Professor, New York University Game Center), a company focused on finding play in cultural practices. Along with Peter Berry, John is a partner in Supercosm, where he focuses on interaction and game design for arts and education clients.

Bibliographic information

TitleGames, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design
Game Design
AuthorsColleen Macklin, John Sharp
PublisherAddison-Wesley Professional, 2016
ISBN0134392221, 9780134392226
Length288 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Computers / Programming / Games
  
Export CitationBiBTeX EndNote RefMan