A spreadsheet is probably the most important tool in game design. While words and images can be used to describe a game, a spreadsheet can represent an entire game in numbers and simulate its rules before a single line of code is written. Some games, at a certain level of abstraction, are basically spreadsheets.
Imagine a game such as Age of Empires or another real-time strategy (RTS) game. Each unit, building, and resources is nothing but a set of numbers and those numbers determine everything that happens in the game. With some skill and a lot of patience, it is possible to program and play a simple RTS or RPG only using Excel. There is more: video games can contain an incredible amount of data and very complex economies. A ...
