Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game with Unity and C#, Rough Cuts

Description

This is the Rough Cut version of the printed book.

Award-winning game designer and professor Jeremy Gibson has spent the last decade teaching game design and working as an independent game developer. Over the years, his most successful students have always been those who effectively combined game design theory, concrete rapid-prototyping practices, and programming skills.

Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development is the first time that all three of these disciplines have been brought together into a single book. It is a distillation of everything that Gibson has learned teaching hundreds of game designers and developers in his years at the #1 university games program in North America. It fully integrates the disciplines of game design and computer programming and helps you master the crucial practice of iterative prototyping using Unity. As the top game engine for cross-platform game development, Unity allows you to write a game once and deliver it to everything from Windows, OS X, and Linux applications to webpages and all of the most popular mobile platforms.

If you want to develop games, you need strong experience with modern best practices and professional tools. There’s no substitute. There’s no shortcut. But you can get what you need in this book.

COVERAGE INCLUDES

• In-depth tutorials for eight different game prototypes
• Developing new game design concepts
• Moving quickly from design concepts to working digital prototypes
• Improving your designs through rapid iteration
• Playtesting your games and interpreting the feedback that you receive
• Tuning games to get the right “game balance” and “game feel”
• Developing with Unity, today’s best engine for independent game development
• Learning C# the right way
• Using Agile and Scrum to efficiently organize your game design and development process
• Debugging your game code
• Getting into the highly competitive, fast-changing game industry

Sample Content

Table of Contents

Preface     xxiv
Part I Game Design and Paper Prototyping     1
1 Thinking Like a Designer     3
You Are a Game Designer     4
Bartok: A Game Exercise     4
The Definition of Game     10
Summary     17
2 Game Analysis Frameworks     19
Common Frameworks for Ludology     20
MDA: Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics     20
Formal, Dramatic, and Dynamic Elements     24
The Elemental Tetrad     27
Summary     29
3 The Layered Tetrad     31
The Inscribed Layer     32
The Dynamic Layer     33
The Cultural Layer     34
The Responsibility of the Designer     36
Summary     37
4 The Inscribed Layer     39
Inscribed Mechanics     40
Inscribed Aesthetics     46
Inscribed Narrative     49
Inscribed Technology     58
Summary     59
5 The Dynamic Layer     61
The Role of the Player     62
Emergence     63
Dynamic Mechanics     64
Dynamic Aesthetics     70
Dynamic Narrative     75
Dynamic Technology     77
Summary     77
6 The Cultural Layer     79
Beyond Play     80
Cultural Mechanics     81
Cultural Aesthetics     82
Cultural Narrative     83
Cultural Technology     84
Authorized Transmedia Are Not in the Cultural Layer     85
The Cultural Impact of a Game     86
Summary     87
7 Acting Like a Designer     89
Iterative Design     90
Innovation     97
Brainstorming and Ideation     98
Changing Your Mind     101
Scoping!     103
Summary     104
8 Design Goals     105
Design Goals: An Incomplete List     106
Designer-Centric Goals     106
Player-Centric Goals     109
Summary     124
9 Paper Prototyping     125
The Benefits of Paper Prototypes     126
Paper Prototyping Tools     127
An Example of a Paper Prototype     129
Best Uses for Paper Prototyping     138
Poor Uses for Paper Prototyping     139
Summary     140
10 Game Testing     141
Why Playtest?     142
Being a Great Playtester Yourself     142
The Circles of Playtesters     143
Methods of Playtesting     146
Other Important Types of Testing     152
Summary     153
11 Math and Game Balance     155
The Meaning of Game Balance     156
Installing Apache OpenOffice Calc     156
Examining Dice Probability with Calc     157
The Math of Probability     165
Randomizer Technologies in Paper Games     170
Weighted Distribu

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