Hey
I’m currently working on my final project for school. It is about programming a game but I also need a theoretical part about general game designe. Is there like litrature about that? Discussing like different genres and/or different strategies on how to design a game so a player stays for as long as possible and so on.
thx
TBH, google would be the best for researching this, and theres alot out there.
The art of game design a book of lenses is a must buy for devs.
For the specifics you’ve asked about here, you’re looking for the terms “engagement” and “retention”. A Google Scholar search for “game design player engagement and retention” gives me a bunch of papers, which might be what you’re looking for. Certainly that will lend you far more credibility than the average blog post.
When it comes to broader game design there are a bunch of books on the topic, though I can’t claim to have first hand experience of many of them. I’d suggest picking your favourite online book shop, searching for “game design”, and then checking out the history of any authors who’s books catch your interest. Focus on books by authors who have had significant roles on shipped games (board game, video game, whatever, it doesn’t matter much).
Finally, as someone already mentioned, there’s plenty to find via online searches. Websites, blog posts, Youtube channels, so on and so forth. The catch is that the quality is… hit and miss. Anyone can publish whatever they want on the 'net, and most of us think we’re experts. The same advice as books applies here, but doubly so - look into the authors of anything, and see if they’ve got a credible background. Many sources you’ll find are non-developers analysing stuff made by other people. That’s a perfectly valid thing to be doing, but as a developer I suspect it’ll have little practical value to you until you’ve got some of your own design experience to apply it to.
some more keyword/terms: gamedev trends
not exacly literature, but the yt channel of gdc probably has talks about this
if you want to approach from the story this is a good screenwriting list
And if course Mark Brown has some solid videos on YouTube.
This is hands down the best book on game design I have ever seen and read
Good Game Design Books:
Gamasutra (now Game Developer) used to be very good, for example this article on the economics of combat (which can be applied to many kinds of games) is something I’ve read a lot of times:
Years ago it would feature many articles written by game designers in the trenches, and game postmortems, but nowadays it’s more like yahoo news of the game development world, such a shame.
That’s a really good article! I’ve been struggling with some of these issues. I just want to make a simple 3D platformer and have never been satisfied with how my combat feels compared to other games. In a good game there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that most people don’t notice and don’t think about. Then when I go and make my own naive version of enemy AI, it just feels broken and it’s hard to tell why.