Each has a description of how it works, discussion of its pros and cons, how it can be implemented, and examples of specific games that use it. Building Blocks can be read cover to cover, used as a reference when looking for inspiration for a new design, help solving a specific problem, or assist in getting unstuck in the midst of a project. This book, the first to collect mechanisms like this in the tabletop game design field, aims to be a practical guide that will be a great starting point for beginning designers, a handy guidebook for the experienced, and an ideal classroom textbook.　 Key FeaturesThe first compendium of its kind in the tabletop game field.Covers the nuts and bolts of design to resolve specific challenges.Serves as a practical guide, a great starting point for beginning designers, and a reference for seasoned professionals.Contains discussion of a series of standalone mechanisms, in a standard format and style, with cross-links to related mechanics and specific examples.Includes hundreds of mechanism entries with accompanying diagrams and sample games to study.Ideal for professional or classroom use.

    It’s not a book with adventures, spells, creatures, or magic items. It’s not a book for characters at all, but a book for players!If you play or run roleplaying games, this book is for you. Inside this gorgeous hardcover book, suitable for your coffee table or your gaming table, you will find advice and suggestions for enhancing your RPG experience at the table and away from it.This is an insider’s look at everything that goes into the hobby—finding a group, making a character, running a game, creating adventures, finding all the right ideas, hosting a game…and that’s just for starters.If You’re an Experienced Gamer -You’ve been gaming for a while now. Maybe even years. You get the concepts, and you understand the rules. No one needs to explain the dice to you. Your Best Game Ever embraces the hobby you love, and provides real tips, immediately usable advice, and hands-on pointers you can use at your game table.If You’re Fairly New to Gaming -Your friends play RPGs. You’ve maybe watched some streaming games, or given it a try a few times. You get the general idea, but where do you go from there? This book will give you everything you need and get you going on the fast track to being a great gamer.

    Games are an interactive medium, and this interplay between author, player and machine provides new and exciting ways to create and tell stories. In each essay, practitioners of this artform demonstrate how traditional storytelling tools such as characterization, world-building, theme, momentum and atmosphere can be adapted to full effect, using specific examples from their games. The reader will learn to construct narrative systems, write procedural dialog, and generate compelling characters with unique personalities and backstories.Key FeaturesIntroduces the differences between static/traditional game design and procedural game design Demonstrates how to solve or avoid common problems with procedural game design in a variety of concrete ways World's finest guide for how to begin thinking about procedural design

    All they really needed was the “new” part of every new game.Cheapass Games were bare-bones, stripped of all unnecessary production cost, and sold at a fraction of their true value. Or so Ernest would have you believe.This book contains the rules and history of more than 100 of these games, so now you can judge for yourself.Do not squander this unique opportunity.

    With Make Your Own Pixel Art, pixel artist Jennifer Dawe and game designer Matthew Humphries walk you step-by-step through the available tools, pixel art techniques, the importance of shapes, colors, shading, and how to turn your art into animation. By the end of the book, you'll be creating art far beyond what's possible on paper!Make Your Own Pixel Art will teach you about:- Creating pixel art using the most popular art software and the common tools they provide- Drawing with pixels, including sculpting, shading, texture, and color use- The basics of motion and how to animate your pixel art creations- Best practices for saving, sharing, sketching, and adding emotion to your artWith a dash of creativity and the help of Make Your Own Pixel Art, your digital drawings can be brought to life, shared with the world, and form a basis for a career in art, design, or the video games industry.

    Ultima, the revolutionary series of role-playing games he designed, and Origin Systems Inc., the company he co-founded in 1983, are inextricably linked to the history of video games. This is their story.

    From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies. Drawing from a wide range of literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, Fickle illuminates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit the roles, play the game, and follow the rules to be seen as valuable in the US. Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas. Bridging the intellectual divide between the embedded mechanics of video games and more theoretical approaches to gaming rhetoric, Tara Fickle reveals how this intersection allows us to overlook the predominance of game tropes in national culture. The Race Card reveals this relationship as one of deep ideological and historical intimacy: how the games we play have seeped into every aspect of our lives in both monotonous and malevolent ways.

    Taking readers through a complete game production, this book provides a clear understanding of expectations of the game animator at every stage, featuring game animation fundamentals and how they fit within an overall project to offer a holistic approach to the field of game animation.Key FeaturesAccumulated knowledge based on nearly two decades of insightful experience in all areas of video game animation.Establishes the fundamentals of creating great video game animation, and how to achieve them.A step-by-step explanation of every stage of a game production from the animator's perspective.Readers should come away with an understanding of the expectations of a video game animator.

    If something is fun, is it pleasant? Entertaining? Silly? A way to trick students into learning? Fun also has baggage—it seems inconsequential, embarrassing, child's play. In Fun, Taste, & Games, John Sharp and David Thomas reclaim fun as a productive and meaningful tool for understanding and appreciating play and games. They position fun at the heart of the aesthetics of games. As beauty was to art, they argue, fun is to play and games—the aesthetic goal that we measure our experiences and interpretations against. Sharp and Thomas use this fun-centered aesthetic framework to explore a range of games and game issues—from workplace bingo to Meow Wolf, from basketball to Myst, from the consumer marketplace to Marcel Duchamp. They begin by outlining three elements for understanding the drive, creation, and experience of fun: set-outsideness, ludic forms, and ambiguity. Moving from theory to practice and back again, they explore the complicated relationships among the titular fun, taste, and games. They consider, among other things, the dismissal of fun by game journalists and designers; the seminal but underinfluential game Myst, and how tastes change over time; the shattering of the gamer community in Gamergate; and an aesthetics of play that goes beyond games.

    They find, among other things, that even developers with a track record are viewed with suspicion if their games are on suspect platforms. They investigate game elements that are potentially troublesome for a game's gameness, including genres, visual aesthetics, platform, and perceived difficulty. And they explore payment models, particularly free-to-play--held by some to be a marker of illegitimacy. Finally, they examine the debate around such so-called walking simulators as Dear Esther and Gone Home. And finally, they consider what purpose is served by labeling certain games "real."

    Angels and Devils. North and South. Harmony and Discord.Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II – Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels continues the saga of the two Blizzards—Blizzard Entertainment, creator of the groundbreaking WarCraft series of strategy titles, and Blizzard North, architect of Diablo's digital hellscape—as both studios struggle to find their identity and forge a path forward.Threatened by competition in the space they popularized, Blizzard Entertainment looks to the stars to build a new franchise and evolve into a well-oiled machine. No longer the underdog, Blizzard North takes Diablo out of murky dungeons and across deserts, jungles, and snowy mountaintops.Success comes at a cost. Corporate greed threatens to overshadow artistic breakthroughs, new talent throws company cultures into flux, and a passion to be the best result in brutal work schedules, broken relationships, and creative burnout that incapacitates visionaries and leaves their teams directionless.Weaving together the making of bestselling products and the crucibles of the people who made them, Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II tells the story of two teams that formed an unstoppable juggernaut even as they proved too combustible to co-exist.

    Video games already depend on AI. We use games to test AI algorithms, challenge our thinking, and better understand both natural and artificial intelligence. In the future, Togelius argues, game designers will be able to create smarter games that make us smarter in turn, applying advanced AI to help design games. In this book, he tells us how.Games are the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. In 1948, Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence, handwrote a program for chess. Today we have IBM's Deep Blue and DeepMind's AlphaGo, and huge efforts go into developing AI that can play such arcade games as Pac-Man. Programmers continue to use games to test and develop AI, creating new benchmarks for AI while also challenging human assumptions and cognitive abilities. Game design is at heart a cognitive science, Togelius reminds us—when we play or design a game, we plan, think spatially, make predictions, move, and assess ourselves and our performance. By studying how we play and design games, Togelius writes, we can better understand how humans and machines think. AI can do more for game design than providing a skillful opponent. We can harness it to build game-playing and game-designing AI agents, enabling a new generation of AI-augmented games. With AI, we can explore new frontiers in learning and play.