Game Developer
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Trade publication, formerly Gamasutra, publishing postmortems, design deep-dives, and technical breakdowns written by working developers. Reading it regularly gives designers concrete accounts of how shipped games solved mechanics, economy, and production problems.
More resources on Game Mechanics Design
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
Presents design as a set of over a hundred lenses, focused questions about players, mechanics, story, and aesthetics, that a designer applies to interrogate a game in progress and find what is actually wrong with it.
Game Maker's Toolkit
Mark Brown's video essay series analysing why particular game systems work, covering level design, difficulty, accessibility, and boss design. Each episode breaks a shipped game down into design decisions a viewer can apply to their own projects.
Game Design Fundamentals
Welcome! This course is an introduction to the primary concepts of gaming, and an exploration of how these basic concepts affect the way gamers interact with our games. In this course you will understand what defines a “game” and the mechanics and rules behind different types of games. Through four linked assignments you'll learn ways to create and describe a game concept, and specifically what makes a compelling game. This course focuses on the conceptual underpinnings of games, and all assignments can be completed with a pencil and paper – no previous programming knowledge is required.
The Game Design Podcast
Join game designers Ananda Guneratne, Charlie McCarron, and Trevor Muller-Hegel as they analyze published games from a game developer's perspective. Each month, they pick a new game mechanic and three games to play in that genre. Each episode is 20 minutes of pure game design nerdiness!
The Game Design Round Table
Covering the full breadth of digital, tabletop, and role playing games, The Game Design Round Table inspires and educates aspiring and experienced game designers.
The Chemistry Of Game Design
Models gameplay as 'skill atoms' — action, simulation, feedback, modeling — chained into skill trees. Gives a diagrammable method for mapping a game's learning loops and pinpointing where players burn out or stall.