To create a great video game, you must start with a solid game design: A well-designed game is easier to build, more entertaining, and has a better chance of succeeding in the marketplace. Here to teach you the essential skills of player-centric game design is one of the industry’s leading authorities, who offers a first-hand look into the process, from initial concept to final tuning. Now in its second edition, this updated classic reference by Ernest Adams offers a complete and practical approach to game design, and includes material on concept development, gameplay design, core mechanics, user interfaces, storytelling, and balancing. In an easy-to-follow approach, Adams analyzes the specific design challenges of all the major game genres and shows you how to apply the principles of game design to each one. You’ll learn how to: Define the challenges and actions at the heart of the gameplay. Write a high-concept document, a treatment, and a full design script. Understand the essentials of user interface design and how to define a game’s look and feel. Design for a variety of input mechanisms, including the Wii controller and multi-touch iPhone. Construct a game’s core mechanics and flow of resources (money, points, ammunition, and more). Develop appealing stories, game characters, and worlds that players will want to visit, including persistent worlds. Work on design problems with engaging end-of-chapter exercises, design worksheets, and case studies. Make your game accessible to broader audiences such as children, adult women, people with disabilities, and casual players. “Ernest Adams provides encyclopedic coverage of process and design issues for every aspect of game design, expressed as practical lessons that can be immediately applied to a design in-progress. He offers the best framework I’ve seen for thinking about the relationships between core mechanics, gameplay, and player—one that I’ve found useful for both teaching and research.” — Michael Mateas, University of California at Santa Cruz, co-creator of Façade
The steady and unabated increase in the capacity of silicon has brought the semiconductor industry to a watershed challenge. Now a single chip can integrate a radio transceiver, a network interface, multimedia functions, all the "glue" needed to hold it together as well as a design that allows the hardware and software to be reconfigured for future applications. Such complex heterogeneous systems demand a different design methodology. A consortium of industrial and government labs have created a new language and a new design methodology to support this effort. Rosetta permits designers to specify requirements and constraints independent of their low level implementation and to integrate the designs of domains as distinct as digital and analog electronics, and the mechanical, optical, fluidic and thermal subsystems with which they interact. In this book, Perry Alexander, one of the developers of Rosetta, provides a tutorial introduction to the language and the system-level design methodology it was designed to support. * The first commercially published book on this system-level design language * Teaches you all you need to know on how to specify, define, and generate models in Rosetta * A presentation of complete case studies analyzing design trade-offs for power consumption, security requirements in a networking environment, and constraints for hardware/software co-design
In this book, veteran game developers, academics, journalists, and others provide their processes and experiences with level design. Each provides a unique perspective representing multiple steps of the process for interacting with and creating game levels – experiencing levels, designing levels, constructing levels, and testing levels. These diverse perspectives offer readers a window into the thought processes that result in memorable open game worlds, chilling horror environments, computer-generated levels, evocative soundscapes, and many other types of gamespaces. This collection invites readers into the minds of professional designers as they work and provides evergreen topics on level design and game criticism to inspire both new and veteran designers. Key Features: Learn about the processes of experienced developers and level designers in their own words Discover best-practices for creating levels for persuasive play and designing collaboratively Offers analysis methods for better understanding game worlds and how they function in response to gameplay Find your own preferred method of level design by learning the processes of multiple industry veterans
Written by a game developer and professor trained in architecture, An Architectural Approach to Level Design is one of the first books to integrate architectural and spatial design theory with the field of level design. It explores the principles of level design through the context and history of architecture. Now in its second edition, An Architectural Approach to Level Design presents architectural techniques and theories for you to use in your own work. The author connects architecture and level design in different ways that address the practical elements of how designers construct space and the experiential elements of how and why humans interact with that space. It also addresses industry issues like how to build interesting tutorial levels and how to use computer-generated level design systems without losing the player-focused design of handmade levels. Throughout the text, you will learn skills for spatial layout, evoking emotion through gamespaces, and creating better levels through architectural theory. FEATURES Presents case studies that offer insight on modern level design practices, methods, and tools Presents perspectives from industry designers, independent game developers, scientists, psychologists, and academics Explores how historical structures can teach us about good level design Shows how to use space to guide or elicit emotion from players Includes chapter exercises that encourage you to use principles from the chapter in digital prototypes, playtesting sessions, paper mock-ups, and design journals Bringing together topics in game design and architecture, this book helps you create better spaces for your games. Software independent, the book discusses tools and techniques that you can use in crafting your interactive worlds.
Written by an AAA industry expert with over 20 years of experience, this book offers comprehensive coverage of the practical skills that all successful level designers need to have. It covers everything from practical production skills to the social and soft skills required to thrive in the gaming industry. This book begins with a theoretical and abstract approach that sets a common language for the later hard-skill applications and practical examples. These later chapters cover a wealth of practical skills for use during the concept phase, while creating layouts, scripting, and working with AI. This book includes essential chapters on topics such as social skills, soft skills, world-building, level design direction, production, as well as how to gain employment in the industry. This book will be of great interest to all level designers, content leads, and directors looking to enhance their skillset. It will also appeal to students of level and game design looking for tips on how to break into the industry.
This book will explain how to verify SoC (Systems on Chip) logic designs using “formal and “semiformal verification techniques. The critical issue to be addressed is whether the functionality of the design is the one that the designers intended. Simulation has been used for checking the correctness of SoC designs (as in “functional verification), but many subtle design errors cannot be caught by simulation. Recently, formal verification, giving mathematical proof of the correctness of designs, has been gaining popularity. For higher design productivity, it is essential to debug designs as early as possible, which this book facilitates. This book covers all aspects of high-level formal and semiformal verification techniques for system level designs. • First book that covers all aspects of formal and semiformal, high-level (higher than RTL) design verification targeting SoC designs. • Formal verification of high-level designs (RTL or higher). • Verification techniques are discussed with associated system-level design methodology.
This book offers readers a set of new approaches and tools a set of tools and techniques for facing challenges in parallelization with design of embedded systems. It provides an advanced parallel simulation infrastructure for efficient and effective system-level model validation and development so as to build better products in less time. Since parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) has the potential to exploit the underlying parallel computational capability in today’s multi-core simulation hosts, the author begins by reviewing the parallelization of discrete event simulation, identifying problems and solutions. She then describes out-of-order parallel discrete event simulation (OoO PDES), a novel approach for efficient validation of system-level designs by aggressively exploiting the parallel capabilities of todays’ multi-core PCs. This approach enables readers to design simulators that can fully exploit the parallel processing capability of the multi-core system to achieve fast speed simulation, without loss of simulation and timing accuracy. Based on this parallel simulation infrastructure, the author further describes automatic approaches that help the designer quickly to narrow down the debugging targets in faulty ESL models with parallelism.
The first book to harness the power of .NET for system design, System Level Design with .NET Technology constitutes a software-based approach to design modeling verification and simulation. World class developers, who have been at the forefront of system design for decades, explain how to tap into the power of this dynamic programming environment for more effective and efficient management of metadata—and introspection and interoperability between tools. Using readily available technology, the text details how to capture constraints and requirements at high levels and describes how to percolate them during the refinement process. Departing from proprietary environments built around System Verilog and VHDL, this cutting-edge reference includes an open source environment (ESys.NET) that readers can use to experiment with new ideas, algorithms, and design methods; and to expand the capabilities of their current tools. It also covers: Modeling and simulation—including requirements specification, IP reuse, and applications of design patterns to hardware/software systems Simulation and validation—including transaction-based models, accurate simulation at cycle and transaction levels, cosimulation and acceleration technique, as well as timing specification and validation Practical use of the ESys.NET environment Worked examples, end of chapter references, and the ESys.NET implementation test bed make this the ideal resource for system engineers and students looking to maximize their embedded system designs.
Many aspiring game designers have crippling misconceptions about the process involved in creating a game from scratch, believing a “big idea” is all that is needed to get started. But game design requires action as well as thought, and proper training and practice to do so skillfully. In this indispensible guide, a published commercial game designer and longtime teacher offers practical instruction in the art of video and tabletop game design. The topics explored include the varying types of games, vital preliminaries of making a game, the nuts and bolts of devising a game, creating a prototype, testing, designing levels, technical aspects, and assessing nature of the audience. With practice challenges, a list of resources for further exploration, and a glossary of industry terms, this manual is essential for the nascent game designer and offers food for thought for even the most experienced professional.
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 better games. Each exercise requires no background in programming or artwork, releasing beginning designers from the intricacies of electronic game production and allowing them to learn what works and what doesn't work in a game system. Additionally, these exercises teach important skills in system design: the processes of prototyping, playtesting, and redesigning.
How do game characters contribute to shaping the playing experience? What kinds of design tools are available for character-based games that utilize methods from dramatic writing and game research? Writer Petri Lankoski has a theory for this. There is a need to tether character design to game design more tightly than has been the case in the past, as well as to pay attention to social networks of characters by the means of finding useful design patterns. “The use of Lajos Egri’s bone structure for a three dimensional-character and of Murray Smith’s three levels of imaginative engagement with characters allows the candidate to expose the full complexity of the imaginary persons represented and controlled in a single-player game. What makes his design-center approach even more interesting is that game play is an integral part of it.” Comments Bernard Perron, Associate Professor of Université de Montréal on Lankoski´s work.
