Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous investigations of “optimal experience” have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow.
During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance.
Scrum and Agile methods are already revolutionizing development outside the game industry.
You’ll learn to form successful agile teams that incorporate programmers, producers, artists, testers, and designers–and promote effective collaboration within and beyond those teams, throughout the entire process.
‒ Understanding Scrum’s goals, roles, and practices in the context of game development
‒ Communicating and planning your game’s vision, features, and progress
‒ Using iterative techniques to put your game into a playable state every two to four weeks– even daily
‒ Managing ambiguous requirements in a fluid marketplace
‒ Getting started: overcoming inertia and integrating Scrum into your studio’s current processes
A Theory of Fun for Game Design is not your typical how-to book.
It features a novel way of teaching interactive designers how to create and improve their designs to incorporate the highest degree of fun.
As the book shows, designing for fun is all about making interactive products like games highly entertaining, engaging, and addictive.
The book’s unique approach of providing a highly visual storyboard approach combined with a narrative on the art and practice of designing for fun is sure to be a hit with game and interactive designers.
Welcome to a book written to challenge you, improve your brainstorming abilities, and sharpen your game design skills! Challenges for Game Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers is filled with enjoyable, interesting, and challenging exercises to help you become a better video game designer, whether you are a professional or aspire to be.
Each chapter covers a different topic important to game designers, and was taken from actual industry experience. After a brief overview of the topic, there are five challenges that each take less than two hours and allow you to apply the material, explore the topic, and expand your knowledge in that area.
This in-depth resource teaches you to craft mechanics that generate challenging, enjoyable, and well-balanced gameplay. You’ll discover at what stages to prototype, test, and implement mechanics in games and learn how to visualize and simulate game mechanics in order to design better games.
‒ Design and balance game mechanics to create emergent gameplay before you write a single line of code.
‒ Visualize the internal economy so that you can immediately see what goes on in a complex game.
‒ Apply design patterns for game mechanics–from a library in this book–to improve your game designs.
‒ Explore the delicate balance between game mechanics and level design to create compelling, long-lasting game experiences.
Readers will learn all the fundamentals of concept development, gameplay design, core mechanics, user interfaces, storytelling, and balancing. They’ll be introduced to designing for mobile devices and touch screens, as well as for the Kinect and motion-capture gameplay. They’ll learn how indie developers are pushing the envelope and how new business models such as free-to-play are influencing design.