The book outlines four project phases--ideation, preproduction, full production, and post-production--that give designers and developers the milestones they need to advance from the first glimmerings of an idea to a finished game.

    Drawing on a wide variety of case studies, Werning argues that production tools shape the aesthetics and political economy of games as an expressive medium. He frames game-making as a (meta)game in itself and shows that tools, like games, have their own procedural rhetoric and should not always be conceived simply in terms of optimization and best practices.