Class Game Design I

The unit is transversal to boardgames and digital games and introduces Game Design as a fundamental component of all games and of creative work in defining, exploring, and perfecting a vision for playable experience in an original game. The unit is meant to provide students with a basic literacy of game design and related skills in specification, prototyping, and testing.
Game Design is the core aspect of original creative work in games and frames the remaining disciplines in game development work. Game Design literacy and an understanding of the game development process in a game design perspective are crucial to not only game design work but also work in all the other disciplines in a game development team. The unit is therefore critical to the degree, not only in preparation of more advance game design units, but also for complementing development and art units.

1, Unit Introduction

• Definition of Design, Definition of Game;
• Game Development and Game Design;
• The job of the game designer;
• Structural Model of Games.

2, Iterative Creativity with Game Structural Elements

• Rules;
• Procedures;
• Player Model;
• Limits;
• Resources;
• Conflict;
• Results;
• Mechanics.

3, Game Creation Model

• Game Design Iterative Process;
• Game Design Atoms;
• Prototyping;
• Playtesting;
• Publishing.

4, Low-level Game Design

• Systems Thinking;
• Analysis and Synthesis;
• Components of the Game as a System (Objects, Properties, Behaviors, Relationships).

The unit consists chiefly of project-based learning, where a series of individually-led micro-projects are used to convey the syllabus contents. Students work mostly in the classroom, creating small games with improvised materials and testing them on other students. Initially, the games are original modifications of existing analog games (playable with paper and pencil, dice, etc.), and then the unit moves on to digital improvisation.

• BRAITHWAITE, B., & SCHREIBER, I. (2008). Challenges for game designers. Boston: Charles River Media.
• FULLERTON, T., SWAIN, C., HOFFMAN S. S. (2008). Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games, 2nd Ed. Amsterdam; Boston; Heidelberg; London; New York: Elsevier: Morgan Kaufmann.
• ISAAC, E. (2022). Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms. ROUTLEDGE.
• HUNICKE, R., LEBLANC, M., & ZUBEK, R. (2004). MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. AAAI-04 Workshop on Challenges in Game AI.
• SALEN, K., ZIMMERMAN, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT Press.