For courses in Fundamentals of Game Design for all video game developers and designers

With a focus on designing for the commercial entertainment market, this text teaches the principles and practice of game design and covers each of the major game genres  individually.

For courses in Fundamentals of Game Design for all video game developers and designers With a focus on designing for the commercial entertainment market, this text teaches the principles and practice of game design and covers each of the major game genres individually.

Our book has been adopted as at textbook at MIT, Georgia Tech, Cornell University, Rensselaer Polytechnic, and numerous other institutions around the world.

Fundamentals of Game Design is an updated edition of our earlier work, Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. This version contains so much new material that Prentice Hall gave it a new title. The earlier book caught on as a textbook, so in this one we have added more features to help instructors and students. It now has multiple choice questions and exercises at the end of every chapter. We’ve also kept the worksheets of questions to ask yourself about your design, which were a popular feature of the older work. In fact, we put in so much new stuff that we had to move two of the chapters from the old book (Online Games and The Future of Gaming) onto the new Companion Website at Prentice Hall.

Fundamentals is more rigorous than Rollings and Adams was, and more comprehensive. It now includes more formal definitions of such important concepts as gameplay, core mechanics, interaction models, and the storytelling engine. We have also increased our emphasis on design process, with more how-to information than the earlier book had. We’ve written four new chapters, a glossary, and an appendix, and expanded our discussion in a number of places.

Here are the names of the new chapters:

- Design Components and Processes. We break the game into key components, and propose a process for doing game design based on current industry practice.

- Creative and Expressive Play. The previous book only touched upon these important aspects of video gaming in the context of other things. We now give them a chapter to themselves.

- Core Mechanics. In Rollings and Adams we had one chapter on mechanics, called The Internal Economy of Games and Game Balancing. We’ve split it into two: one called Core Mechanics and one called Game Balancing. This time we go into much more detail about what mechanics are and how to design them. The balancing chapter is also longer.

- General Principles of Level Design. This was an area that we just didn’t have time to address in the previous book. Level design is a critically important part of the job, and though we can’t cover everything, we now provide a solid grounding in the basics.

- Appendix: Designing to Appeal to Particular Groups. We added this to cover a number of issues that designers ought to know about choosing a target audience: men and women, adults and children, girls and boys, and how to make your game more accessible to people with impairments of various kinds.

Ernest Adams is an American game design consultant currently working in England with the International Hobo game design group. In addition to his consulting work, he gives game design workshops and is a popular speaker at conferences and on college campuses. Mr. Adams has worked in the interactive entertainment industry since 1989 and founded the International Game Developers’ Association in 1994. He was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions, and for several years before that he was the audio/video producer on the Madden NFL Football product line at Electronic Arts. He is the author of two other books and the Designer’s Notebook series of columns on the Gamasutra developers’ webzine.

Andrew Rollings (co-author of the highly successful books Game Architecture and Design, and Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design) has a B.S. in Physics from Imperial College, London and Bristol University and has worked as a technical consultant spanning the games industry and the financial industry since 1995.

For courses in Fundamentals of Game Design for all video game developers and designers

With a focus on designing for the commercial entertainment market, this text teaches the principles and practice of game design and covers each of the major game genres  individually.