Making Games

Under construction - please feel free to recommend additional resources so I can add them! If you're interested in more resources on XYZ topic, please feel free to leave a comment or message me and I'll see what I can turn up.

Especially interested in resources for
- accessibility
- anything in podcast/audiobook format - I almost never do podcasts/audiobooks because I space out every five minutes or wander out of the room and lose the thread, but I know the format works well for others.

Assume everything is in English unless otherwise specified.

Last updated: 2024-05-24.

IMPORTANT: I'm recommending a number of resources that talk generally about general game design as separate from coding, if you want to do video games. (Among other things, I am a modestly terrible coder. I cannot offer support or troubleshooting on any coding/computer front.) If something is focused on video games/coding, I will explicitly mention that.

Also, if your goal is becoming a game design professional, we're happy to cheer you on, but I have no expertise to offer. :p We hope you report back, though!

Game design courses/textbooks/theory
websites
- Board Game Design Lab: Getting Started - everything from design to Kickstarter for board games to recommended games to play/study. There's a ton of material. Honestly, this is great; if you're specifically interested in board game design (as opposed to RPGs or video games), start here.

- Game Design Concepts is a free online course in blog format. The caveat is that it uses Brathwaite & Schreiber's Challenges for Game Designers as a required text and link rot has hit a number of the linked readings. The course isn't "running" as a community, but much of the content remains online. Starts from zero. Includes exercises.

- Game design principles [Ashton MacSaylor] - Don't annoy the player. Good mechanics teach a skill, then test the player on that skill. Create interesting choices. Deliver meaningful challenges. Build your game for a story (marry excellent game mechanics to a compelling story without sacrificing either).

- A bestiary of player agency [Sam Kabo Ashwell] - Proposed possibilities: Big Decisions, usually with an ethical component; protagonism and narrative action; velocity, or the arc of the story being told corresponding in some significant manner with the arc of the play experience; grasp, the desire and ability to handle the world at some level; focus; identity and self-insertion; challenge, i.e. when progress through a game requires significant exertion from the player; tactics and strategy; creative agency; meta, e.g. players wanting a say in the design of games in beta, or cheating; negative agency, cf. Stephen Bond's IF Rameses; reflective choices; weak interaction, e.g. splitting text into sections ("Porpentine is a matter of the high-impact no-choice jump"--yes!); exploratory agency; agency of possibility; completionism.

- "I Have No Games and I Must Design" by Greg Costikyan [PDF] - a foundational essay on game design theory and critical vocabulary. Fun, short reading.

- Richard A. Bartle's "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs - whether or not you've ever played in a MUD, this is a useful discussion of different playstyles/player motivations. See also GNS theory, below, for RPGs.

- Slippery Slope and Perpetual Comeback by David Sirlin on game balance.

- Also, David Sirlin on writing clearly (especially relevant for writing rules!): Part 1: Sensibilities, Part 2: Clear Thinking, Clear Writing, Part 3: Origins of a Writer, and my favorite, Part 4: Trolling.

- Twine games show the best choice is often the one that doesn't exist - doesn't just apply to Twine.

materials
- Jeremy Holcomb's The White Box [Amazon] is a $25 box of prototyping components (meeples, dice, blank cards, etc.). I bought one for myself because it's super cute. Ironically, it's like that Nice Sketchbook You Are Afraid to Ruin for me! I have better luck prototyping on SUPER janky materials like scratch paper. :p But someday maybe I'll challenge MYSELF to use the dang thing. IMO this is worth it for the included White Box Essays (also by Holcomb) on tabletop/analog game design, although you can buy that separately. Note that a lot of places will sell you packs of prototyping materials if you like something nicer than SUPER janky materials - hex maps, rando dice assortments, meeples, spinners, blank cards, etc.

videos
- Mike Selinker's 10 rules for writing rules [YouTube].

transcript of Selinker's 10 rules
1. Use no Intermediary Terminology (Call things what they are, not what you think people might think they are)

2. Use Real Words (Don't create Jargon you don't need to. Talk like a human)

3. Make No More Work Than Necessary (Procedures should not have extra steps)

4. Add Flavor, But not too Much! (Be the narrator you need to be to get the info across)

5. Write No Text Smarter Than Your Players (Aim for a 3rd grade reading level if possible)

6. Discard Rules That Cannot Be Written (If a rule cannot be reasonably explained via text, just make the game have different rules)

[I'm thinking of the NOTORIOUS Legend of the Five Rings CCG "foo of bar" rule, created to handle a special case for a card that was so bad that no one used it! And it sat there cluttering up rulebooks for literally years and years!)

7. Take a Breath (Keep sentence length short. Separate ideas)

8. Go Easy on the Eyes (Don't capitalize every term, or emphasize everything. Write sentences)

9. Get the Final Version Play tested (There are mistakes you will not notice that are obvious to new people)

10. Fix it in Post (Mistakes are not the end of the world)

11. Special Bonus Rule, Don't be Dawizard (don't make dumb editorial mistakes like using Ctrl+F)

If you're confused by #11, here's the story behind "Dawizard":

Encyclopedia Magica Volume One is the first of four volumes of the Encyclopedia Magica set, which aimed to publish every magic item ever featured in a Dungeons & Dragons product to date. It was published by TSR in 1994 for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition.

The first volume was notoriously afflicted with a search-and-replace error, resulting all instances of "mage" being replaced with "wizard", including when appearing in other words like "image" and "damage", producing such sentences as: "The tower can absorb 200 points of dawizard before collapsing."

…I really feel like someone got fired over that…

- On games: painting life with rules [Nordic Larp video talk] - Johanna Koljonen, cited in The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp, Knutpunkt 2014, ed. Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen, and Jon Back: The summary has the bit I find most interesting: "games as an art form exploring the limitations of free will..." (21).

- Can playing games teach us about war? [Nordic Larp video talk] - Eirik Fatland: What games can show us about people's hunger for cruelty; war as entertainment. One notable example cited was a Nordic larp in which players were taught "patriotic songs" as a way of celebrating their side, and which players learned and sang with enjoyment. In the debrief afterward, it was revealed to them that the songs were translated/adapted Hitler Youth songs and that they had played out a scenario adapting the development of the Axis Powers. (I'm paraphrasing badly--see the talk.) One, this is a very sobering talk; two, I would freak the fuck out and I can see this as being serious potential trigger territory. Which is part of the point, but I honestly don't know how you can get informed consent for something like this, or whether it's desirable to. Cf. Brenda Romero's Train. Worth thinking about ethics of game design anyway.

books
Note: a disadvantage of physical game design textbooks is that they tend to be pricey.

These are approximately in the order I recommend them, from beginner to advanced (modulo particular interests - like, if you don't care about TTRPG design, you can skip anything on that topic).

- Tracy Fullerton. Game Design Workshop, 4th ed. General game design. Starts from zero and goes all the way through marketing/publishing. Includes exercises.

- Jeremy Holcomb. The White Box Essays. If your focus is creating a physical (tabletop/board/TTRPG) game and you're already familiar with the basics of game design, this is my recommendation. It's affordable, very pragmatic, and a fast read.

- Raph Koster. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. This is, in fact, purely theory, but it's a fast read (lots of pictures) and absolutely fantastic. No exercises.

- Brenda Brathwaite [now Brenda Romero?] & Ian Schreiber [the guy behind Game Design Concepts, above]. Challenges for Game Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designer. Don't be put off by the title if you're NOT doing a video game; a lot of crossover application. A more advanced text. Includes exercises.

- Geoffrey Engelstein & Isaac Shalev. Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms, 2nd ed. Absolutely magisterial catalogue/partial taxonomy (a complete one is probably impossible) of tabletop game mechanics.

- Colleen Macklin & John Sharp. Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design. More advanced text that assumes you have a handle on the basic concepts. Lots of examples, does not include exercises.

- Lewis Pulsipher. Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish. Somewhat quirky but fun to read approach, more of a board game/war game focus. I don't think this includes exercises, will have to double-check.

- Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play. A foundational text in game design theory. This is low on the list NOT because it's not important or, well, magisterial, but because it is a CHONKER (around 600 pages), extremely theoretical, and quite frankly overkill for the average newbie. No exercises.

- Jesse Schell. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. A great book on theory and philosophy of design, but quite advanced. Also spendy as all get-out.


math
Sorry: you're probably going to have to get a general handle on probability/statistics for many (not all) types of game design. Ironically, I have a math B.A. but took zero probability/stats in undergrad.

Also known as, the math works out such that the "super-powerful artifact" Sommerswerd is LESS effective than other means in the later Lone Wolf gamebooks [Project Aon versions, which are free under their terms; for the reissued print books, see Magnamund).

books
- Deborah Ramsey, PhD. Probability for Dummies.

websites
- Khan Academy: Statistics and Probability (high-school-level introduction). I have not yet gone through this, but I expect it is likely to be excellent based on my previous encounters with Khan Academy's math instructional materials. The lessons are generally videos; I recall there were audio + captions in English, not sure about other languages.


accessibility
If you have more resources on accessibility for games, I'd appreciate hearing about them so I can add them here!


books
- Via davidgillon, the Planet Mercenary RPG (tabletop) has a section on ways to improve accessibility - for example, initiative in this game is normally "whoever calls out their action first acts first," which disadvantages slower thinkers; there's a neat workaround for that! (Will double check the page numbers when I have time.)

websites
- On visually and physically accessible board games [Brandon the Game Dev].

- Guest post from Dr. Michael Heron, Meeple Like Us: Accessibility and board games [ALA].

- Games for everyone: accessibility in board games [Rempton Games].

- Meeple Like Us - on hiatus, but has a bunch of archived material on the topic of accessibility in board games.

- Neurodiverseity and UX: essential resources for cognitive accessibility. Not specific to games. Thanks to the friend who pointed me at this.

- Designing for accessibility in games [Ludogogy] - brief overview.

- Game accessibility guidelines - geared toward video games.


Rapid prototyping
If you do nothing else with your game, do a rapid prototype + playtest.

websites
- How to prototype a game in under 7 days by Raph Koster. Learn about rapid prototyping and use it!

- Board Game Design Lab: Prototypes - Extensive series of articles and resources on prototyping.

videos
- Hitchhiker's Guide to Rapid Prototypes [YouTube]. GDC 2017, Mark Barrett, about 25 minutes.


Playtesting
Websites
- Ten insightful playtest questions [Game Developer].

- 20 Playtesting Questions That Set Players Up To Give Great Answers [Entro Games].


Board games and related topics
sites
- BoardGameGeek - massive site of collective reviews/ratings of LOTS of board games.

books
- Gabe Barrett. Board Game Design Advice from the Best in the World, 2nd ed. A collection of interviews with top game designers (Reiner Knizia, Richard Garfield, etc. - the field does traditionally seem heavily male-dominated?). Mostly what I get out of this is EVERYONE DESIGNS DIFFERENTLY. Fun read though.


TTRPGs and related topics
books
- Monte Cook. Your Best Game Ever. Summarizes a modern approach for TTRPG best practices, e.g. around consent/safety tools and "socializing for RPGs, how do." Book report.

- Robin D. Laws. Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering. What it says on the tin.

websites
- bankuei's (yeloson) Deeper in the Game WordPress blog has a TON of great resources, theory, etc. Especially check out the index of intro material in the sidebar on the right.

- The Power 19 [Socratic Design] - Nineteen questions you might consider for your TTRPG design. Really excellent.

- GNS theory [Wikipedia] - a theory of three main preferences for how players engage with TTRPGs: gamist (mechanics/"crunch"), narrativist (story), simulationis (world). In practice people are rarely "pure" versions of one type (although my husband is almost pure gamist!).

LARPs and related topics
- Nordic Larp - I have minimal LARP experience, but Nordic Larp was the first time I learned of bleed in a formal sense.

consent/safety in RPGs
Note that there has been a fair amount of recent-ish innovation in this area but there is by no means a complete settled consensus as to how one should handle this (nor should there be, given that different gamers/groups will have different needs/preferences).

- Consent in Gaming [free PDF from Monte Cook games]. Overview of the topic for TTRPGs (e.g. "It's not up for debate" and "Anyone is allowed to leave an uncomfortable situation at any time"). It mentions the X-Card mechanic by John Stavropoulos as one possible consent tool. There's discussion of recovery from consent violations, aftercare, check-ins, and bleed; some of this I've seen discussion of in Nordic LARPs. There's also a consent checklist along with guidelines on how to use it and not to use it. At thirteen pages, this is concise but useful.

- Lines and Veils, and other RPG safety tools [Dicebreaker]. Formal safety tools were not widely known/understood when I started gaming.

- The X-Card [Wikipedia] - describes a simple safety tool by John Stavropoulos.

Gamebooks and CYOA (choose-your-own-adventure)
See also resource post for Twine, IF, text adventures.

websites
- The problem with gamebooks trilogy, part 1 - Narrative is not a game mechanic [Raph Koster], "There is no such thing as a player character"The problem with gamebooks trilogy, part 2 - Static fiction vs. games: Characters vs. avatars. Destiny vs. agency. Participants vs. players.

- The problem with gamebooks trilogy [sic], part 4 - Note that part 3 appears to be a dead link, possibly because it discussed technologies and is now dated. Protagonist options: (1) anonymize the main character vs. (2) main character with an identity. Problem with anonymous main character: (1) unable to interact meaningfully with NPCs (what do they represent?); (2) can't be woven into fabric of story/world (why are they here?); (3) devoid of genuine motivations (why would they do this?). Problem with main characters with an identity: Promise that "YOU are the hero" is broken. Solution: "you are NOT the hero."

- The problem with gamebooks trilogy [sic], part 5 - Need to fix gamebook plots, which are a string of set-pieces. Causality is borked due to limited ability to store and apply previous choices. Solid narrative state vs. liquid narrative state --> procedural scene generation? Twine and Inkle have these capabilities.

- Fixing gamebooks, part 6 - The interaction wall: the point where a reader abruptly switches from receiving feedback (reading the story) to providing input (making choices). Disrupts flow of story. Solutions: (1) increase the frequency of interaction; (2) allow the reader to do nothing (not available in traditional gamebooks); (3) (?) don't give readers too much to think about at a time; (4) break the fourth wall.

- Classifying and rating linearity [Jake Care] - Types: Linear, Convergent, Divergent, Free Roaming. See webpage for diagrams.

- Gamebooks: The value of doing it with dialogue [Dave Morris] - Text is cheap. It can't do everything, so stick to art for top-level navigation (maps) and NPC faces. Otherwise, use dialogue as much as possible in place of descriptive text, especially for NPC dialogue.

- How do we make gamebooks a pleasure to read? [Dave Morris] - Players/readers skim ahead to interactive elements. Solutions: less prose? better prose? Traditional uses of prose in static fiction: scene-setting, action, exposition (past action), speech, interior monologue. Gamebooks have typically only used the first two. Use dialogue! Write with the same depth that you would give to other literature.

- Do gamebooks need text? [Dave Morris] - The sweet spot for a gamebook app is the perfect balance between graphics ("game") and text ("book"), e.g. Inkle's Sorcery! apps. New interactive books could either dispense with gameplay ("interactive literature") or do something with much less text (Fabled Lands or interactive motion comics--the latter tending to circle back to adventure games).

- Do gamebooks need dice? [Dave Morris] - Antecedents: RPGs via tabletop wargaming to simulate the unexpected. In RPGs, dice are democratic vs. GM whimsy. In a gamebook, they only increase the sense of threat. Big climactic fights in gamebooks are rarely left to the dice - there's usually an item or clever tactic. It's not just about a lucky roll.

- Gamebooks where you're not the hero [Dave Morris] - IF casts the reader as the protagonist. Should 2nd person POV be jettisoned to allow greater narrative flexibility? What about IF where the player takes the role of author, not protagonist?

- Does interactive fiction need randomness? [Dave Morris] - In a digital gamebook, victory should be about cunning, e.g. Attack Strength in Inkle's Sorcery! app. How much do we want the gameplay to be visible? To get more people to read gamebooks, de-geek the mechanics, usually by hiding them
- and if the stats are hidden, there's no more point in randomness. [Counterpoint: games like Disco Elysium?? The linked essay was written in 2013 though.]


Interactive fiction (IF) and text adventures
See resource post. Twine, Ink, Narrat, Ren'Py, more.

websites
- Twine games show the best choice is often the one that doesn't exist.

- Four common mistakes in interactive novels [Dan Fabulich]. Not enough delayed branching; fix: use "if" sections and put some lines in each chapter that describe how earlier chapters affect current events. Bad mix of stats. Easy choices. Too many words per choice ("wall of text"). Go with 100-200 words before a choice, 400 tops.


Video games (general)
- fancoded - "A community for fans and fandom-adjacent folk to share coding resources, collaborate on projects, and ask for help. This could range from original interactive fiction projects and RP journal profile codes to Ao3 work skins or video game mods. All skill levels welcome!" Thanks to momijizukamori for suggesting this.

- Matt Hackett's How to Make a Video Game All by Yourself: 10 Steps, Just You and a Computer is a small volume that will not teach you how to code; rather, it will talk you through how to suss out a game engine that you like enough to stick with, plan your project, handle its scope, etc. I have the book in dead tree format, but it's also available in ebook (PDF, epub) for $8.99.

- David Sirlin's archive of essays - many of these are geared toward video game design and balance, although a number are applicable to general game design!

- Game accessibility guidelines - geared toward video games.

music/sound for video games
- Winifred Phillips' A Composer's Guide to Game Music is the gold standard for techniques specific to scoring for video games. The caveat is that she assumes you are proficient in composing.

- see also: resources: music and sound for video games.

video game design analysis
books
- Patrick Holleman. Reverse Design: Final Fantasy VII and Reverse Design: Super Mario World. Slim volumes, but they analyze the mechanics and what made these games work. Thanks to yeloson for recommending this series. There are others! I picked those two because they're spendy and I had to start somewhere, and I'd at least seen FFVII played, as opposed to being completely unfamiliar with a number of the others.


ethics of games and game design
- Jane McGonigal. Reality Is Broken. One of the rare books that discusses the ethics of game design, especially when you're creating feedback loops that can e.g. inculcate addictive behavior. Not a textbook as such.

- Natasha Dow Schüll. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. I'm indebted to rachelmanija for bringing this book to my attention and A Friend. It's (probably?) unlikely that a hobbyist designer is going to create a game experience/environment that's that addictive; but this is definitely a sobering look at the dark side of game design. (See also: this discussion of ethical/legal issues with gacha [video] gaming.)


game and game design miscellany
books
- Will Hindmarch & Jeff Tidball. Things We Think About Games. A slim volume, but thought-provoking.

websites
- Sirlin.net has a smorgasbord of essays on game balance, game design, writing game rules etc.
- Shut Up & Sit Down's How to teach board games like a pro [YouTube].
- Designing Games That Matter [scroll down] - obvs. I haven't been to this workshop, but the notes are freely available for download (PDF). Resources, including reflections on cultural appropriation, game design, etc. One worksheet: "Your game has a heart," with "the heart" at the center and around it: artistic voice, social contract, core mechanics, reward cycles, narrative flow, central themes. Another: "The Big Three" (cites The Forge as the source of these questions): "What is your game about?" / "What do the characters do?" / "What do the players do?"


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Some of my own thoughts:
I'm not a professional, but I've done some smaller game design projects (Winterstrike for Failbetter Games, Ninefox Gambit RPG from Android Press, various small Inform 6 and 7 IFs and Twine games) and freelanced as a game writer/narrative consultant (Counterplay Games' Duelyst and Godfall, Alderac Entertainment Group's Legend of the Five Rings).

Orientation to game design.

Narrative in game design
- #1 Narrative in game design.
- #2 Character in Gamebooks and Computer Games
- #3 Game Design, Narrative, and Incentives
- #4 Detour: Creature of Havoc, choice, and characterization


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MASTERLIST OF CHALLENGES/TUTORIALS

NOTE: All challenges are intended to be "at your own pace," regardless of how quickly I post them. I'm happy to answer questions (or give feedback/discuss ideas, if you'd like) in comments at any time.

Challenge #1: Making a Smol (Tabletop/Analog) Solo Game (complete)
- 1.1 framework for design, deciding on parameters and desired player experience
- 1.2 research!
- 1.3 design document, rules!
- 1.4 rapid prototyping.
- 1.5 playtesting.
- 1.6 iterative design.
- 1.7 release! (fin)

Challenge #2: Making a Smol TTRPG (in progress)
- 2.1 What is a TTRPG? / getting your feet wet: a business card RPG
- 2.2 creating a one-page TTRPG that has a GM (forthcoming)
(more to come!)


There will probably be a later challenge stepping through making a smol video game. Possibly also mini-challenges like "play a new-to-you game, write up your impressions." Feel free to leave requests/suggestions for future challenges in comments or by messaging yhlee. :)