Fundamentals of Game Design (Game Design and Development) (Paperback)

For courses in Fundamentals of Game Design for all video game developers and designers

With a focus on designing for the commercial entertainment market, this text teaches the principles and practice of game design and covers each of the major game genres  individually.

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.

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