Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, & Playtesting Games

by Chris Swain and Tracy Fullerton

As experienced teachers of novice game designers, the authors have discovered patterns in the way that students grasp game design - the mistakes they make as well as the methods to help them to create... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1578202221
• ISBN13: 9781578202225
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: CRC Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Reference

I like this book so much, I've purchased it 3 times! (My first copy was "borrowed" by one of my designer/producers, my second copy was left at Ubisoft SF, and this is my 3rd copy for myself.) Great mixture of theories, old-school practices, and new-school techniques.

Great book

Although I personally disagree with some parts of what this book teaches, it this game design book is one of the most comprehensive I've seen. Well-recommended.

Excellent Practical Book of Game Design

I consider this an excellent book on game design. As an amatuer board game and basic computer game designer, I found a lot of the material extremely useful in the *process* of coming up with a game from start to finish. The chapter on prototyping did a great job in showing how to go ahead and create a prototype from a game idea, while keeping it simple and concentrating on the "core gameplay mechanism." The chapter on "Playtesting" and "Functionality, Completeness, and Balance" builds on the prototype chapter by emphasizing the iterative nature of design where one go aheads and evaluates, tries new things, identify problems and keep evolving. The next chapter following is maybe the most important chapter that discusses whether you game is fun, goes in to some theory of what makes a game fun, and relates various techniques of improving player's choices so as to make the game fun. This is a great book that gives you the necessary tools to go ahead and be able to at the very least create a viable prototype of a game that is possibly fun and playable.

good book for educational use

This might be a good book for teachers looking for material in their classes gamedesign or gamedevelopment. It may also be a good book for selfstudy, if you have the discipline to do the exercises. You need to have played a lot of the classic videogames though, otherwise you might not be able to do the exercises, which are mostly about thinking about gamedesigns and making little designs or design alterations on existing games.

Not programming, Not Graphics, Overall Game Design

Few people realize just how big a business digital gaming has become. Think of it this way: It's bigger than the domestic box office of the film industry. The amount of time spent playing games by young people now exceeds everything but television in time spent on entertainment. The main factor driving the development of the new extremely powerful computers is gaming, slower machines are capable of handling almost all office tasks. The authors of this book have a great deal of experience in both designing games and teaching how to design games. This has given them an understanding of how beginning designers grasp the structured elements of games, common traps they fall into, and certain developmental exercises that help the student learn to make better games. Note that this is not a programming manual, nor is it a graphics design manual. It is on game design. What are the characteristics that make a game, how can you prototype and play test the game without a horrendous programming expense, and finally some input on the game industry and how to decide on how you might like to be employeed in that industry.