Ready to give your design skills a real boost? This eye-opening book helps you explore the design structure behind most of todayâ??s hit video games. Youâ??ll learn principles and practices for crafting games that generate emotionally charged experiencesâ??a combination of elegant game mechanics, compelling fiction, and pace that fully immerses players.
In clear and approachable prose, design pro Tynan Sylvester also looks at the day-to-day process necessary to keep your project on track, including how to work with a team, and how to avoid creative dead ends. Packed with examples, this book will change your perception of game design.
When I first picked up the physical copy of this book, I was hoping Sylvester would be telling us about designing virtual worlds. Then the opening chapter informed me that fun in games is derived from emotionally manipulating the players. That's not the kind of game I want to play or make, so I rejected the book. Years later, I finally made the time to skim the rest of it in digital form, and found a long lecture about many general concepts of game design. It's not a bad rundown, there is a surprising amount of breadth here based on perfectly reasonable conclusions. But, as he says at the end of the book, "This is a book of models and hypotheses, not realities and truths." Much like typecasting games as emotional manipulation apparatus was technically accurate but not fully representative of all games, everything Sylvester lays out here is just one way of looking at it. Its authorative tone works against it somewhat, sounding like the realities and truths he warns us this isn't.