Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design (Voices That Matter) 1st Edition

I am a solo indie designer/developer and have been reading a lot on how to design and develop games over the past 3 years. It has been part time as I work full-time overseas. I have read numerous articles and books on game design to understand the process. Most of the material though I found assumed you were a student looking to work for a AAA studio; designing for a particular genre; or already working in a AAA studio and needing to polish your knowledge. They got me started, but I had to filter a lot of the info so it applied to my situation and needs. I came across this book while reading another book on game design. I am very glad to have purchased and read it. Unlike the others, it is genre neutral and focuses on the basics that a designer needs to understand to have a solid foundation. The writing is clear and the concepts presented have several examples across different genres to demonstrate how they apply regardless of genre. The book also takes the player-centric approach to game design. It also introduces a tool called Machinations which is used to test how the core mechanics work. That alone was a great thing to learn and has helped me immensely in my understanding of how to design games. I would highly recommend this book for any student of game design (formal or informal), especially people like me who want to take a hobby to a possible vocation.

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Ive only gone through this once but I will be going through it several more times.There are almost no books on game mechanics but this one makes up for it. It really goes into depth on what an economy is in a game and the effect of positive and negative feedback.There is of course a healthy amount of mechanics theory and plenty of game examples (across all major genres). However where this book really shines is the machinations system.Be warned machinations is no joke and will take some dedicated work to learn and practice. However machinations is a powerful prototyping feature that can help you make a good starting point for game balance and testing out plausible game mehanics or there effects.Great book just know it is very advanced and there is a learning curve!

I think this book about their framework Machinations, not about game mechanics itself. I don't like it.http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/I read reviews for many books trying to choose one that give me useful knowledge about creating mechanics. I'm interested in creating card and board games, so mechanics is most important. But I didn't find even comprehensive overeview or discussion about it.IMHO, THIS BOOK IS PR(réclame) of framework MACHINATIONS and examples of how it is "cool".This framework is like uml-diagram for algorithm, but it is more interactive. On their site you can find 18 diagrams:PacMan - this game is ok for machination, you can see the model or whole process and collect some statistics, even get some playing (one click when all is totally bad, and you can even win).Diablo 3 - is it a joke?! The diagram is more simpler than for pacman!!! Resources on diagram: damage - is continuously reduce life; life - you can restore in only few times. So, the only thing you can see with this diagram - you die no matter what you will do.I try to read all chapters from different sub-chapters and random places, but did find nothing useful or even fundamental, or even "non-empty". To be honest I still cannot finish this book.

One of the two great game books I've read, the other being Jesse Schell's Book of Lenses. Where the Book of Lenses is more broad, Earnest Adams' book is specific and detailed, outlining how to diagram game systems to analyze them. This means that it's usefulness may be more limited, but providing game design professionals with tools to help understand and process their work is a huge win.

I bought this book because I'm interested in game design. I can guess basic things, so I was drawn to the title 'Advanced...'I found the book pretty useless. The first 60 pages are a general introduction and mildly interesting, then it's downhill.The authors introduce and use their own custom diagram language. I found this pretty useless as most concepts discussed are pretty simple, a few examples are enough. Instead I would have appreciated more real game examples. Code written in Python (or whatever) would have been clearer than various diagrams at different LODs.The last 200 pages of the book I skimmed and tried to read interesting passages, but I kept getting bored. No real meat apart from approx. 20 so-called patterns, but even these are pretty obvious and/or not discussed in a cohesive way.I'm sure there are better books on game design out there.

Based heavily on Joris Dormans's doctoral thesis, this book discusses how to analyze game mechanics in terms of resource flow and feedback. It is an incredibly powerful framework which deserves more attention than it gets.Game designer professionals and would-be's should pay attention to the ideas and patterns elaborated here.

I really like the not quite so fluffy style of describing the mechanics of game economy. The "machinations" diagrams and program is really useful, but it would have been nice if a simpe version of the source code for a simple version of a program that demonstrates the handling of pools and connection was available. It could have clarified some of the occasionally vague descriptions of how they consider pools and the sequence of evaluation.

I bought this book and the previous at the same time so have only just started reading this one, but the quality of the last one and what I have read so far already get this full marks. This book deviates away from the tradition gdd focus and instead goes over core mechanics, I personally loved this.Thanks -Anthony

Required reading for any serious games designer

If not... Is this editor using consumer-grade printers from the 2000s to print this book?I am VERY dissatisfied, the print job is terrible with illegible areas, all images look discolored and worse then what I get with my own printer. The pizza delivery ads I get on my mailbox look 1000 times more professional. I would not expect this quality from a 3€ book, let alone a 70h€ one.This is awful, and I really hope that this is a counterfeit, otherwise it would make no sense.

The contents of this book are obviously a must read for any Game Designer.But the print is...meh. The paper is almost as thin as toilet paper, a lot of the screenshots have washed out colors, there are lots of artifacts on several pages. The worst is that some of the tables in there are so badly mangled that you don't even see the text that should go in there.

Practical conceptualization of game design with pictorial representation of mechanics, book tried to encapsulate the vast and deep topic of game structure and formation.One of the few books to carry along in my messenger.