100 Principles of Game Design

Game designers spend their lives solving extraordinary problems and facing mind-bending paradoxes. It’s their job to make a meticulous plan for “spontaneous fun” players will want to experience over and over again. Pressure is heaped on with demands for innovation and blockbuster status. So designers find themselves facing an abyss of problems, pressure, and possibilities, armed only with their brains and an assortment of design principles they picked up over years of experience.

For the first , 100 Principles of Game Design gathers some of the best of these big ideas into one toolkit. Seasoned designers will be glad they don’t have to hold it all in their heads anymore, and bning design students can use the book to learn the tools of the trade. When the going gets tough, everyone can turn to this book for guidance, inspiration, or just to rd them of what works. Collected from every popular school of thought in game design, these core principles are organized by theme: innovation, creation, balancing, and troubleshooting.

Includes advances from the world’s leading authorities on game design, some explained by the creators themselves

A reference book of finite, individual principles for easy access, providing a jumping off point for further research

Principles originating in fields as diverse as architecture, psychiatry, and economics, but shown here as they apply to game design

Richly designed with illustrations and photos, making each principle easy to understand and memorable

less approach includes feedback loops, game mechanics, prototyping, economies of scale, user-centered design, and much more

Professional designers and instructors at one of the world’s leading game design institutions lay out the building blocks of diverse knowledge

required to design even the simplest of games.