Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design

Introduction

This is a book about games at their deepest level. No matter how good a game looks, it won’t be fun if its mechanics are boring or unbalanced. Game mechanics create gameplay, and to build a great game, you must understand how this happens.

Game Mechanics will show you how to design, test, and tune the core mechanics of a game—any game, from a huge role-playing game to a casual mobile phone game to a board game. Along the way, we’ll use many examples from real games that you may know: Pac-Man, Monopoly, Civilization, StarCraft II, and others.

This book isn’t about building Unreal mods or cloning somebody else’s app that’s trending right now. It’s called Advanced Game Design for a reason. We wrote Game Mechanics to teach you the timeless ...