Master the Principles and Vocabulary of Game Design Why aren’t videogames getting better? Why does it feel like we’re playing the same games, over and over again? Why aren’t games helping us transform our lives, like great music, books, and movies do? The problem is language. We still don’t know how to talk about game design. We can’t share our visions. We forget what works (and doesn’t). We don’t learn from history. It’s too hard to improve. The breakthrough starts here. A Game Design Vocabulary gives us the complete game design framework we desperately need—whether we create games, study them, review them, or build businesses on them. Craft amazing experiences. Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark share foundational principles, examples, and exercises that help you create great player experiences…complement intuition with design discipline…and craft games that succeed brilliantly on every level. <ul>
<li> Liberate yourself from stale clichés and genres </li> <li> Tell great stories: go way beyond cutscenes and text dumps </li> <li> Control the crucial relationships between game “verbs” and “objects” </li> <li> Wield the full power of development, conflict, climax, and resolution </li> <li> Shape scenes, pacing, and player choices </li> <li> Deepen context via art, animation, music, and sound </li> <li> Help players discover, understand, engage, and “talk back” to you </li> <li> Effectively use resistance and difficulty: the “push and pull” of games </li> <li> Design holistically: integrate visuals, audio, and controls </li> <li> Communicate a design vision everyone can understand </li> </ul>

A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design (Game Design/Usability)

Computers & Technology

Anthropy, Anna

Clark, Naomi

Games & Strategy Guides

Addison-Wesley Professional

You're Star Wench, interstellar adventurer! With your pilot Suzie Starbright, you cruise the galaxy with only one goal in mind: the powerful and treacherous Queen of Space! With her mind-control raygun eye and her boundless space empire, she is literally unbeatable. Your quest is doomed to failure, but what kind of failure?How does the story end? Only YOU can find out! Your one choice: which page to open up to. Keep reading until you've suffered not one but MANY terrible fates!

Star Wench

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Omnium Gatherum Media

Learn to make interactive games with Scratch—the beginner-friendly, block-based programming language from the MIT Media Lab! Anna Anthropy, game designer extraordinaire, will show you how to do everything from building a game map to creating animations and debugging the end product. Take a peek inside the history of video game design, learn programming basics, and turn your ideas into creative games that you can play and share with your friends.Learn how to:•Draw characters like a hungry, leaf-eating bug•Animate characters—make them walk, jump, climb, and fall!•Create objects for your player to collect and obstacles to avoid•Design multiple levels to create a cave exploring platform game•Create sound effects and music for your games•Share your games online and use player feedback to improve your gamesIsn’t it time to Make Your Own Scratch Games? The world is waiting!Covers Scratch 3.0

Make Your Own Scratch Games!

Humor & Entertainment

No Starch Press

Bring your game ideas to life with Twine! Twine is a free online tool that lets anyone new to programming create their own interactive, story-based adventure games in a web page. In Make Your Own Twine Games!, game designer Anna Anthropy takes you step-by-step through the game development process, from coming up with a basic idea to structuring your game. You’ll learn the basics of Twine like how to use links and apply images and formatting to make your game look more distinct. You’ll get tips on how to test your game, export it, and publish it online, and even understand more advanced features like scripting to get your game to remember and respond to player choices. As you make your way through the book and begin crafting your own interactive fiction, you’ll learn other cool tricks like how to: • Write stories that follow multiple paths using hyperlinks • Create variables to track your player’s actions • Add scripting like “if” and “else” to decide when ghosts should appear in your game • Use hooks to add fancy touches like text effects, pictures, and sound With example games to act as inspiration, Make Your Own Twine Games! will take you from story-teller to game designer in just a few clicks! Ready player one? The game starts now. Covers Twine 2

Make Your Own Twine Games!

Fun introduction to game development by well-known game designer using PuzzleScript, a free online tool for creating puzzles/platform games.Make Your Own PuzzleScript Games! shows you how to use PuzzleScript, an open source tool for making puzzle games using HTML-like scripting language. Anthropy walks readers through game development process, covering everything from problem-solving and level design to making winning and losing fun. Readers will understand what makes designing video games challenging and fun, and they'll be ready to bring their own game ideas to life.

Make Your Own PuzzleScript Games!

Part critical essay, part manifesto, part DIY guide, and altogether unprecedented, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters shows why the multi-billion dollar videogame industry needs to change—and how a new generation of artists can change it. Indie game designer extraordinaire Anna Anthropy makes an ardent plea for the industry to move beyond the corporate systems of production and misogynistic culture and to support games that represent a wider variety of human experiences. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is a call to arms for anyone who's ever dreamed of making their own games. Anna’s guide to game design encourages budding designers to bring their unique backgrounds and experiences to their creations and widen the playing field of an industry that has for too long catered to an adolescent male consumer base. Anna’s newest game, Dys4ia, an autobiographical game about her experiences with hormone replacement therapy, has been featured in The Penny Arcade, IndieGames, and TigSource.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form

Seven Stories Press

In 1991, long before Epic Games was putting out blockbusters like Unreal, Infinity Blade, and Gears of War, Tim Sweeney released a strange little MS-DOS shareware game called ZZT. The simplicity of its text graphics masked the complexity of its World Editor: players could use ZZT to design their own games. This feature was a revelation to thousands of gamers, including Anna Anthropy, author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. ZZT is an exploration of a submerged continent, a personal history of the shareware movement, ascii art, messy teen identity struggle, cybersex, transition, outsider art, the thousand deaths of Barney the Dinosaur, and what happens when a ten-year-old gets her hands on a programming language she can understand. Itâ€™s been said that the first Velvet Underground album sold only a few thousand copies, but that everyone who heard it formed a band. Well not everyone has played ZZT, but everyone who played it became a game designer.

ZZT (Boss Fight Books)

National Book Network

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Books by Anthropy, Anna