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

by Colleen Macklin, John Sharp

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 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

Genres: Game Design, Games, Nonfiction, Design, Technology, Video Games

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2016

Reviews

[Michal Domanski · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's not much new in here which hasn't been already covered by either 'The Art of Game Design' by Jesse Schell or 'Game Design Workshop' by Tracy Fullerton. The author positions the book as 'not another Game Design book', yet the book rehashes most of the concepts taught in the aforementioned books in his own way, without a clear structure or consistency to the theoretical framework. There is next to no reasoning given why the author thinks his own framework needs to deviate from the commonly known structural elements, despite those elements being repeated and built upon in the later chapters.

I can’t really recommend this book. There is some valuable insights though, namely some theory on iteration in game design, which make up roughly 50 pages, which I consider the core of the book (as indicated by its subtitle). Unfortunately it is not enough to make up for the rest of it, which is a shame, since every designer iterates differently and no book I know really covers a comprehensive overview over the different techniques applied. As mentioned by the authors, prototyping alone could fill a whole book. Why not fill a whole book with all the different ideation, prototyping, playtesting and evaluation techniques. I'm sure a lot of novel designers have a lot of question marks in their head, which this book unfortunately doesn't answer to a sufficient extent.

[ashleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’ll he making a board game (it seemed like a good idea at the time lmfao) for my capstone and this was a really good breakdown of the process esp for beginners

[Reido · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great formalised view on how to create games. Taking an iterative process of going from conception to production. The intriguing factor of the book was seeing both the authors love of systems being employed throughout the book. The architecture in how to create and step forward is simplified and structured in such a way; where it makes it seamless to understanding where one is within the process, and how to go about it next. If your looking about a book about visual aesthetics, and software your getting the wrong book. This book is a formalized way in how to create an idea, mitigate your mistakes quickly through processes, and then modeling it through affordances one may have. A great read.

[Michala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful for new game designers

What I liked:
- core concepts explained in clear language,
- cited sources (hyperlinked in kindle edition) meant I could go off down rabbit holes.
- the sections on prototyping and play-testing, some good nuggets in there. Particularly that you can test a part of the design - it doesn’t have to be the whole thing.

What I didn’t like:
- whist core principles can equally apply to board game design, this was skewed towards at software based game designers in the various examples/mini case studies.
- if you’ve got experience of agile then little in the iterative ‘approach’ will be new to you.
- the project / task management section. Given who the audience likely is for the book I think few would use a spreadsheet for tracking, more likely jira, asana, etc.

3.5 / 5 from me

[Jason Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid foundation for any game designer with lessons for game designers of any eventual discipline, be it digital or analog.

[Alec Zhang · Rating 2 out of 5]

bit hard to really put a number to this one; the basic design principles seem solid enough even if not novel, but ultimately for me this book is much more focused on small-team indie development of more singularly-focused games rather than AAA behemoths. i also won't really know if this is truly a solid foundation until later in my career.

[DragonCodes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Assigned as part of a class. Good book, I learned a bit.