Exploring Game Mechanics
Principles and Techniques to Make Fun, Engaging Games
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Dedicated to my family, friends, and gamers everywhere!
Gaming is an ever-expanding billion-dollar industry. Its success can be credited to the fact that everyone – young, old, somewhere in between – loves playing games! If you like games with colorful, pixel graphics and upbeat, Chiptune music, you have nostalgia-filled classics like Super Mario Bros., Pac-Man, and Space Invaders that you can play. If you’re into casual mobile gaming, you have great titles like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Among Us, and Angry Birds. On the other hand, if you prefer something with realistic graphics, immersive storylines, and memorable characters, there are tons of AAA gaming franchises that can suit your liking such as Uncharted, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Halo.
Every game is unique and has the potential to provide an amazing feeling of achievement. To understand what makes games so appealing to gamers, we can break them down into their fundamental nuts and bolts – their mechanics. No matter how complex the game, it leverages on the basic need of any gamer – to successfully complete a task that’s clear and easy to understand. By focusing on how gamers think and by looking into the mechanics of popular games, we can get a better idea of how to create content that is more engaging and enjoyable.
Only when you dive deep into the design of how something works do you truly appreciate the work of its creator. Come and join me on this journey, readers, gamers, and developers, as we take a closer look at the world of game design.
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it!
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
—Sir Isaac Newton
Who we are and what we do is greatly influenced by the important people in our lives. Every person we come across changes us in many subtle ways, pushing us to be better and inspiring us to be the best version of ourselves.
I’m immensely grateful toward a lot of people for making this book come to fruition.
I would like to thank my family for being supportive and patient, and for motivating me while I spent back-breaking hours working on the manuscript!
I am grateful to my friends (all around the world!) for making me laugh and smile, and for always believing in me.
I feel lucky to have been taught by so many wonderful teachers over the years. Thank you for teaching me, inspiring me, and making me capable enough to write a book!
Shortly after publishing my first book, Beginning Game Development with Godot, I got a chance to work on another one. I am immensely grateful to my acquisition editor, Spandana Chatterjee, for giving me this opportunity to combine my passion for writing and gaming. I would also like to thank my technical reviewer, Simon Jackson, for taking the effort to go through the entire book and suggesting valuable feedback. Moreover, I am thankful to Mark Powers, Sowmya Thodur, and the rest of the Apress team for their collaboration and help.
Finally, I would like to thank Luis Zuno (Ansimuz), Paul Laulhe (Quaternius), Prakasit Khuansuwan (jcomp/Johnstocker), and the image designers on Freepik for letting me use their beautiful game assets in the book.
Thank you all for making my dream a reality!
A photograph of Maithili Dhule.
A photograph of Simon Jackson.
His primary focus at the moment is with the XRTK (Mixed Reality Toolkit) project, which is aimed at building a cross-platform Mixed Reality framework to enable both VR and AR developers to build efficient solutions in Unity and then build/distribute them to as many platforms as possible.