Cause and Effect Game Design

Cause and Effect Game Design

Creative vision is not a gift. It's a skill, and it's about to be demystified. Cause and Effect Game Design is a practical toolbox loaded with detailed steps for creating endlessly compelling video games. Learn the essential skills as taught by the game design instructor at UCF's prestigious Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA), rated the #1 graduate program in the world for 3 of the last 4 years by the Princeton Review and PC Gamer. With over forty years of experience in video game development between them, award-winning designers Rick Hall and Matt Laurence walk readers through the process of ideation through early development, providing a methodology for not only dreaming up innovative mechanics but, more importantly, shaping them to fit the needs and expectations of a target audience. Whether you're totally stumped at the stage of dreaming up the core idea or you have that, but need help refining it and adding to it, this book can help you. Hall and Laurence provide the necessary tools for establishing a hierarchical design framework. They break down and explain the connections that must exist between audience personality, genre, mechanics, and aesthetics, so that the resulting design space is both cohesive and empowers the rest of your dev team to contribute to the design in a more accurate way. All I can say is "Wow!". Rick and Matt have taken decades of knowledge and experience in game design and boiled it down to a delectable gourmet meal of game design wisdom. Whether you already design games or are just getting started, there are plenty of practical techniques laid out here to use. I can't recommend this book highly enough! Read it today and keep it on your shelf (or ebook reader) for inspiration when you inevitably hit a difficult design problem in the future! -- Gordon Walton, CPO, Executive Producer at Playable Worlds