Game Design Online Resources
From EQUIS Lab Wiki
Contents |
Good Reads
Here are a bunch of interesting reads I've found talking about game design. If you don't want to comb through all the stuff below, try just picking off a few of these ones
What are Game Mechanics?
What are game mechanics? by Dan Cook.
This paper synthesizes a few different points of few about "fun" (being learning about a system, from Koster's Theory of Fun) and "game mechanics" while presenting some new ideas as well. In this case a "mechanic" is where the behaviour of the game lives and it gets analysed indirectly by players through interaction (it interacts with game tokens, or elements). After defining what a mechanic is, there is a discussion of different kinds of mechanics and how they get along with the player.
MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research
A paper found on Marc LeBlanc's page, (PDF).
The authors present an interesting framework through which to consider games. Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics. They define each of these (roughly "rules", the game as it plays, and how much fun it is), how the perspective on these layers is different from the developer (who views them left to right, starting with mechanics) and the player (who views them right to left, starting with Aesthetics).
Game Design Related Websites
Most of these sites have some kind of RSS or Atom feed and are updated fairly regularly, good to keep an eye on, some are more academic than others.
Lost Garden
Lost Garden is a weblog maintained by game developer Danc (he worked for Epic Megagames!). He discusses concepts in game design and provides some surprisingly elegant models for various aspects of game design. He has started touching on software design issues as well, and introduces HPD (hours of gameplay per development years) which could be a very useful metric. There is a running series of posts where he details a design document using the models and ideas he has described.
Of particular interest
The advantages of a small team producing a game, illustated with HPD.
A model is shown that breaks up a game into various dependent layers
Decription of a process for designing a game along with an applied 'case study' by creating a board game.
Jay is
jay is is the weblog of Jay Bibby, a grad student at RIT who studies game design/development. Each post refers to a game (free and playable from the web, usually Java or Flash) along with a little description. It ends up being an incredibly broad sampling of games along with some light commentary. Valuable for "research" purposes.
Gamasutra
Gamasutra, which requires free registration, is a great source of information on many areas of game development (from pathfinding to team management to dead reckoning). It is targeted at professional game developers. Gamasutra is maintained by the CMP Game Group, who also publish Game Developer Magazine.
GameGame
Aki Järvinen has come up with a downloadable (in PDF) card game intended to teach game design fundamentals. Players choose themes, mechanics, goals, and components in a race to get their game published. They say that it is also great for brainstorming. It's called GameGame.
