Acknowledgments

A ton of thanks need to be heaped into three piles, so in no particular order, I would like to acknowledge that our “inspiration” for this book is another book used the world over by great game designers; it is called Universal Principles of Design, by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler. So many great game designers I know count this as a valuable part of their professional library.

However, when we started introducing this book to students in the Game Design program at Full Sail University, we discovered that this classic was in some ways too advanced for them. Their inexperience made it too hard for them to make the leap from architecture or art to game design. We initially tried to write a book that bridged the gap between these wider, classic universal principles and the process of game design. But we soon found that we wanted to add a few game-design-specific principles here and there. And then we found that “a few” had turned into 85 or so, and there was no end in sight. So now there are a few principles in this book that are also covered in Universal Principles of Design, but not very many. In my opinion, these two books are great companions on the bookshelf of any game designer.

And the next acknowledgment goes to the person who deserves undying thanks and delicious home-made baked goods every holiday for the foreseeable future. Ray Yuen, the illustrator, who I swear has a collection of gnomes under his back porch sketching adorable, funny characters doing wacky things like bringing a gun to a knife fight, did great things for this book in an insanely short amount of time and did an admirable job of adding zombies. Thanks, Ray. I hope you share the cookies with the gnomes.

And third, but not last, is the long list of contributors who went off this cliff with me. Thanks so much, everybody—you know what for. Specifically, I think Keyvan Acosta gets credit for the original idea for this book, Chris Keeling gets credit for being a temporary figurehead, and Ricardo Aguilo gets credit for being with us in spirit but having finally learned how to say “no” when asked to volunteer for something. I’d better stop now before I get any more teary-eyed about all the great contributors (and the amazingly wonderful editor at New Riders, Karyn Johnson, who tells me I have no more room on the page). So I’ll just say I love every one of you, and your baked goods are in the oven right now.