--- title: Game Design description: Game design is the foundational study of creating rules, systems, and experiences for interactive media. You will understand player psychology, prototyping methods, system design, and how to iterate on gameplay concepts to create engaging experiences. category: arts-design subcategory: game-development difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/game-design --- # Game Design Game design is the foundational study of creating rules, systems, and experiences for interactive media. You will understand player psychology, prototyping methods, system design, and how to iterate on gameplay concepts to create engaging experiences. ## Available Resources 4 Books • 2 Courses • 3 Websites • 1 Papers ## Courses ### 1. Creating Video Games (MIT CMS.611J) **Author:** Philip B. Tan, Richard Eberhardt, Sara Verrilli et al. Developing original digital games in small multidisciplinary teams: game design, audio, visual aesthetics, fiction and programming, with iterative prototyping and focus testing backed by data analysis. 45 lecture videos, slides and example projects show how to run a game production cycle. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/cms-611j-creating-video-games-fall-2014/ **Tags:** game-design, video-game-development, game-production, playtesting, prototyping ### 2. Game Design (MIT CMS.608) **Author:** Philip B. Tan, Richard Eberhardt Design and analysis of non-digital games across genres, including sports, card, board, chance and role-playing games. Teams design, build and playtest original games to see how rules interact and evolve. Provides 24 lecture audio recordings (about 18 hours) and design assignments with examples. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/cms-608-game-design-spring-2014/ **Tags:** game-design, board-games, playtesting, game-mechanics, iterative-design ## Websites ### 1. Unity Learn Unity's own tutorial platform, organised into guided pathways and project-based courses that build 2D, 3D, VR, and AR scenes step by step. Finishing a pathway leaves you able to script gameplay in C# inside the editor. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://learn.unity.com/ **Tags:** unity, game-development, tutorials, c-sharp, learning-pathways ### 2. Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra) Design section of the long-running game industry trade publication, carrying postmortems, analyses and blog posts written by working developers. Readers see how shipped games handled tuning, economies, difficulty curves and systems design, with reasoning from the people who made those decisions. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design **Tags:** game design, systems design, postmortems, game balance ### 3. Game Developer 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. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.gamedeveloper.com/ **Tags:** game-design, game-development, postmortems, game-industry ## Podcasts ### 1. Designer Notes **Author:** Soren Johnson Long-form interview podcast in which strategy designer Soren Johnson walks accomplished game designers through their full careers. Conversations cover design philosophy, prototyping, systems, and lessons from shipped titles, giving listeners insight into how experienced designers make and revise creative decisions. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** en-us | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://idlethumbs.net/designernotes **Tags:** game-design, designer-interviews, design-philosophy, game-development ### 2. Game Dev Unchained **Author:** Game Dev Unchained Our podcast breaks the mold of don't ask don't tell about the video game industry. We give everyone the real inside look at what its like to be a professional game developer, Every week we'll interview pro and indie developers, we'll talk jobs, studios, salaries and of course crunch horror stories. Tune in! Hosted by Brandon Pham **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en-us | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.gamedevunchained.com **Tags:** game-industry, game-development, developer-interviews, game-careers ### 3. The Game Makers **Author:** Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences A series of in-depth conversations between video game makers on the business and craft of interactive entertainment. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.interactive.org/Interviews/the_game_makers_notebook.asp **Tags:** game-development, developer-interviews, game-industry, interactive-entertainment ## Youtubes ### 1. Game Maker's Toolkit Mark Brown dissects shipped games one design problem at a time. The Boss Keys series maps Zelda dungeon topology as graphs; other episodes cover difficulty curves, accessibility and level design. Structured argument over gameplay footage, not reaction commentary. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.youtube.com/@GMTK **Tags:** game-design, level-design, game-analysis, video-essays ## Papers ### 1. MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research **Author:** Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek Five-page paper introducing the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework, separating a game's rules from the runtime behaviour they generate and the emotions players actually report. Grew out of the GDC Game Design and Tuning Workshop, 2001-2004. Shortest high-leverage read in the topic: it is the vocabulary almost every other design analysis assumes you already have. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf **Tags:** game-design, mda-framework, game-studies, design-theory ## Books ### 1. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Third Edition **Author:** Jesse Schell Schell's hundred-plus 'lenses' are question sets for interrogating any game: its mechanics, aesthetics, story, balance and player psychology. The third edition adds VR, AR and free-to-play examples. The standard analytical toolkit in most design programs. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138632058?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** game-design, design-lenses, player-psychology, game-development ### 2. Game Design Workshop **Author:** Tracy Fullerton Fullerton's playcentric textbook teaches design through exercises in paper prototyping, playtesting, and iteration. Readers finish able to break games into formal and dramatic elements, and to test an original concept before writing any code. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1482217163?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, arts-design, game-development ### 3. Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design **Author:** Scott Rogers Scott Rogers' practical guide to video game design, drawn from his work at studios including Sony Santa Monica. Covers game concepts, characters, cameras, controls, combat and level design, with templates for writing design documents and pitching ideas. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/047068867X?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** game-design, level-design, game-design-documents, character-design, game-mechanics ### 4. A Theory of Fun for Game Design **Author:** Raph Koster Koster argues that fun is the brain's response to learning patterns, and uses cognitive science plus cartoon illustrations to explain why games stop being engaging once their underlying pattern is mastered. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1932111972?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, arts-design, game-development --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/game-design