Reddit Reddit reviews Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Third Edition

We found 10 Reddit comments about Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Third Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Computers & Technology
Books
Computer Science
Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Third Edition
AK Peters
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10 Reddit comments about Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Third Edition:

u/kalas_malarious · 7 pointsr/gamedev

Are you looking for how to make games? Not just programming, but actually make them? I have some suggestions, but they often aren't about programming. There is a million books about programming, but finding those that talk about the ideas and ways to successively improve is a better point to start from.

  • The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
  • Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games
  • Kobold Guide to Board Game Design

    Making video games is easy. Put the pitchfork down and let me explain. Anyone can open unity and load some assets and call it a game. Making good games is difficult, and even if you are not looking at card/board games, you should be prepared to test your game on paper. It is easier to make iterative improvement if you can look for mechanical and mathematical issues by scrawling some notes on paper cards.

    For a book that covers both programming and game design, I also suggest this one.

    These books will cover the psychology, the pitfalls, etc that come with making a game. You do not need a class to make a game portfolio. You can often get things done faster by a book, because it's goal is to teach as you read, not set a timer for 15 weeks. It can assume you will do it over 26 weeks or more if the book is huge.

    Anyway, this is a much larger reply than I intended. Hopefully these are informative. If nothing else, they are significantly cheaper than a class.
u/roguecastergames · 7 pointsr/roguelikedev

Divided Kingdoms

I've been very busy at work, so development time was limited this week:

u/MinMacAttack · 2 pointsr/leveldesign

Buying him computer hardware might be nice, but there's a lot of other ways to give something related to games and game design.

There's always a great big pound of dice. It's full of dice of assorted numbers of sides, and a game designer remotely interested in tabletop (which should be all of them) can use a healthy supply of dice for making tabletop games. There's always the fun of just rolling dice giant handfuls of dice. I'm out right now but I'll add the link when I get back home. Here's the link: Pound of dice

I'd also look into games he hasn't tried. BoardGameGeek has a lot of board games listed and reviewed that you could get, and of course there's always steam. For board games I'd recommend:

  • Red Dragon Inn, a fun party game for 2-4 that's best with 3+. You play as a bunch of adventurers after big dungeon raid and now they're spending gold at their local tavern and gambling. Can support more players with its sequels.
  • Monopoly Deal: A card game version of Monopoly, without the bullshit. Unlike it's big board game cousin, it actually plays out fairly quickly while still being focused on building monopolies to win the game. As a game player perspective it's a fun game, but also from a game designer's perspective it's interesting to see how this game re-imagines the original board game while being true to the source material and streamlining many of its game mechanics.
  • Carcassonne: A well known classic game that works well with 2-5 players where players build up a world of castles, farmland, and roads.
  • Bang the Dice Game: A game where the sheriff and his deputies face off against the outlaws but nobody knows who to shoot. At the start of the game players are given their roles in the conflict but only the sheriff shows who they are. The rest of the game involves social deduction to try to figure who everyone is supposed to be shooting, and trying to read past bluffs. The game works great for 5-8 players, and can work for 3-8.

    There's also a lot of books on game design you can get him. You may have to check to see if he owns some of these already, but I've found them to be great reads that I can recommend to anyone interested in game design.

  • Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: This is a book that tells "The Triumphant, turbulent stories behind how video games are made" and talks about the stories behind 10 different games from across the video game industry and what went on during development. I just bought this one and haven't gotten to chance to read it yet, but I'm excited to start it soon.
  • The Art of Game Design: This is one of the most well known books on game design that discusses a lot of what makes games work. I recommend it to anyone interested in game design.
  • Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games: This book talks about everything that goes into how to design a game and some key differences on how some types of games work. It's more on the beginner/intermediate side, so some of it might be familiar to him.
u/FlagstoneSpin · 2 pointsr/tabletopgamedesign

I'm currently reading Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop, and it's very interesting because she's heavily involved in a college tabletop design program. Even if you don't go in for that, her book is fantastic as something for you to do on your own. It's filled with exercises for you to explore and do.

u/satineclair · 2 pointsr/funny

I'm taking a Game Theory and Design class as part of my game & simulation development degree. Here is the specific book I'm learning from. It's a pretty good read.

u/destructor_rph · 1 pointr/gamedev

Which Book is better?

This One or This One?

u/againey · 1 pointr/gamedev

I think that's a hard enough question even when targeting the general population within that age group. So it can be difficult to find well researched and experientially backed up information even without the more specific target of children with autism. Though I'll also note (as someone with a degree of autism himself), depending on the individual's particular autistic attributes, the condition can actually be a strength for studying something such as game design. The focus on designing rules and working out all the implications for their effects on the gameplay experience can often be a natural fit for someone with autism. At least in my case, the key for effective learning was to grant me the time, space, and tools to explore a subject in my own idiosyncratic way, at which point I could soak up all sorts of knowledge and concepts.

As for concrete recommendations, the one that comes to my mind is to look outside of computers for at least part of your teaching material and activities. I wasn't expecting it initially, but while reading a variety of game design books to improve my own knowledge for making video games, I repeatedly encountered the recommendation to do as much of your early prototyping away from the computer as possible. That is, design board games, card games, sports-like games, party games, and so on. In many cases, you can pull ideas from a variety of game types to build hybrids that do a decent job of replicating the essence of certain video game mechanics, giving you a chance to evaluate how fun the concept is, and if it merits spending time to make a more in depth digital version.

Best of all, it can be free or very cheap, it requires no knowledge of coding, you can do it anywhere (though preferably with a good work table and some craft supplies and standard physical gaming equipment), and you can get results in just a few hours, or maybe even a few minutes depending on the concept. Anything using a standard deck of 52 cards is particularly simple to test, for example.

Two of the books I've already read that had sections helping me think in these terms were:

u/megazver · 1 pointr/gamedev

Well, you said video games so everyone started listing video game stuff, but I'd suggest taking a different tack. Start off by learning some game design by making some boardgames together:

https://smile.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Innovative/dp/1482217163/

https://smile.amazon.com/Challenges-Games-Designers-Non-Digital-Exercises/dp/1542453313/