Books on game design?

I’m looking for some good books on game design and principals, kindle preferably. By game design I mean theories of keeping players coming back, learning curves etc not how to program and stuff like that.

Does anyone have any suggestions please?

Thanks :smile:

Great book, also comes with an iPhone app(for the cards) and it’s cards are an interesting idea. I can highly recommend this book.

Another vote for this book.

That’s a fantastic and insightful book.

Great book, do yourself a favor and buy it.

We have the book here at our office.

Another app is Chat Mapper.
There’s a free version where you can download and do non-linear game design.

Some people have made export feature from ChatMapper to Unity.

^^ This++

Thanks guys, went bought Art of Game Design. :slight_smile:

I’ll check out Chat Mapper too.

There has to be more than one book you guys can recommend, though, right?

I could not recommend any.
The most cost-effective are YouTube videos and free projects you can download to learn.

Many books are re-hashed content that was originally from their Unity 2.xx books.
Many private pay-per-month websites have mostly old Unity 2.xx content.

(When you find out most of the content is rehashed from Unity 2.xx books, videos – that sucks if you asked me…)

“Level Up!” is good.

Thanks for the tip, by the way. Never realised there was an iPhone app for the “Lenses”. Downloading now - awesome :slight_smile:

I’ve read level Up and it is indeed good. Most people have made 1-2 games will already know 95% of the stuff, so I read it more for inspiration purposes. These types of books also “clear up” some notions that you might have already have but that were still quite vague

Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun.

http://www.theoryoffun.com

^ This. Those are the 2 best books on game design. These non-game books made me a better game designer: Free by Chris Andersen, The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, Flow by Csikszentmihalyi, and Mindset by Carol Dweck.

Gigi

Both LevelUp! and Art of Game Design are great and easy to recommend.

LevelUp is very action adventure oriented. Art of Game Design can be a bit too academic at times.

someone must know of some free e-books on the subject…