Introduction
This is a book about games at their deepest level. No matter how good a game looks, it won’t be fun if its mechanics are boring or unbalanced. Game mechanics create gameplay, and to build a great game, you must understand how this happens.
Game Mechanics will show you how to design, test, and tune the core mechanics of a game—any game, from a huge role-playing game to a casual mobile phone game to a board game. Along the way, we’ll use many examples from real games that you may know: Pac-Man, Monopoly, Civilization, StarCraft II, and others.
This book isn’t about building Unreal mods or cloning somebody else’s app that’s trending right now. It’s called Advanced Game Design for a reason. We wrote Game Mechanics to teach you the timeless principles and practice of mechanics design and, above all, to give you the tools to help you do it—for a class, for a career, for a lifetime.
We also provide you with two unique features that you won’t find in any other textbook on game design. One is a new tool called Machinations that you can use to visualize and simulate game mechanics on your own computer, without writing any code or using a spreadsheet. Machinations allows you to actually see what’s going on inside your mechanics as they run and to collect statistical data. Not sure if your internal economy is balanced correctly? Machinations will let you perform 1,000 runs in a few seconds to see what happens and put all the data at your fingertips. Machinations was created by Joris Dormans and is easy to use on any computer that has Adobe Flash Player installed in its web browser. You don’t have to use the Machinations Tool to benefit from the book, though. It’s simply there to help reinforce the concepts.
The other unique feature of Game Mechanics is our design pattern library. Other authors have tried to document game design patterns before, but ours is the first to distill mechanics design to its essence: the deep structures of game economies that generate challenge and the many kinds of feedback loops. We have assembled a collection of classic patterns in various categories: engines of growth, friction, and escalation, plus additional mechanisms that create stability cycles, arms races, trading systems, and many more. We’ve made these general enough that you can apply them to any game you build, yet they’re practical enough that you can load them in the Machinations Tool and see how they work.
Game mechanics lie at the heart of all game design. They implement the living world of the game; they generate active challenges for players to solve in the game world, and they determine the effects of the players’ actions on that world. It is the game designer’s job to craft mechanics that generate challenging, enjoyable, and well-balanced gameplay.
We wrote this book to help you do that.
Who Is This Book For?
Game Mechanics is aimed at game design students and industry professionals who want to improve their understanding of how to design, build, and test the mechanics of a game. Although we have tried to be as clear as we can, it is not an introductory work. Our book expands on the ideas in another book by Ernest Adams called Fundamentals of Game Design (New Riders). We refer to it from time to time, and if you lack a grounding in the basics of game design, you might find it helpful to read the current edition of Fundamentals of Game Design first.
The chapters in Game Mechanics end with exercises that let you practice the principles we teach. Unlike the exercises in Fundamentals of Game Design, many of them require a computer to complete.
How Is This Book Organized?
Game Mechanics is divided into 12 chapters and 2 appendixes that contain valuable reference information. There is also a quick reference guide to Machinations in Appendix A.
Chapter 1, “Designing Game Mechanics,” establishes key ideas and defines terms that we use in the book, and it discusses when and how to go about designing game mechanics. It also lists several forms of prototyping.
Chapter 2, “Emergence and Progression,” introduces and contrasts the important concepts of emergence and progression.
Chapter 3, “Complex Systems and the Structure of Emergence,” describes the nature of complexity and explains how complexity creates emergent, unpredictable game systems.
Chapter 4, “Internal Economy,” offers an overview of internal economies. We show how the structure of an economy creates a game shape and produces different phases of gameplay.
Chapter 5, “Machinations,” introduces the Machinations visual design language and the Machinations Tool for building and simulating mechanics. It includes an extensive example using Pac-Man as a model.
Chapter 6, “Common Mechanisms,” describes a few of the more advanced features of Machinations and shows how to use it to build and simulate a wide variety of common mechanisms, with examples from many popular game genres.
Chapter 7, “Design Patterns,” provides an overview of the design patterns in our design pattern library and offers suggestions about how to use them to brainstorm new ideas for your designs.
Chapter 8, “Simulating and Balancing Games,” explains how to use Machinations to simulate and balance games, with case studies from Monopoly and Will Wright’s SimWar.
Chapter 9, “Building Economies,” explores economy-building games, using Caesar III as an example, and takes you through the design and refinement process for a new game of our own, Lunar Colony.
Chapter 10, “Integrating Level Design and Mechanics,” moves into new territory, looking at how game mechanics integrate with level design and how properly sequenced challenges help the player learn to play.
Chapter 11, “Progression Mechanisms,” discusses two kinds of progression. We start with traditional lock-and-key mechanics and then consider emergent progression systems in which progress is treated a resource within the economy of the game.
Chapter 12, “Meaningful Mechanics,” concludes the book with an exploration of the role of mechanics in transmitting meaning in games that have a real-world message to send. This topic is increasingly important now that game developers are making more serious games: games for health care, education, charity, and other purposes.
Appendix A, “Machinations Quick Reference,” lists the most commonly used elements of the Machinations Tool.
Appendix B, “Design Pattern Library,” contains several patterns from our design pattern library. You can find the completed design pattern library in the online Appendix B at www.peachpit.com/gamemechanics and a much more extensive discussion of each design pattern in Chapter 7.
Appendix C, “Getting Started with Machinations,” is available online at www.peachpit.com/gamemechanics and provides a tutorial for using the Machinations Tool.
Companion Website
At www.peachpit.com/gamemechanics you’ll find material for instructors, digital copies of many of the Machinations diagrams used in this book, more design patterns, and a step-by-step tutorial to get you started with Machinations. To get access to this bonus material, all you need to do is register yourself as a Peachpit reader. The material on the website may be updated from time to time, so make sure you have the latest versions.