How to Read This Book

How the book is organized#

The book has five parts, and the order matters.

1. The Common Mistake. The single mistake that practically every designer and developer makes, the big ones included, and the traps that lead people into it. Knowing it up front saves you the most painful lessons.
2. The Mindset. How to think while designing: purpose, human beings and their needs, and how an inspiration turns into a project. This is the most important part of the book.
3. Intention Is Not Action. Real situations where developers with good intentions made decisions that did the opposite of what they wanted, and why. With the mindset in hand, you'll see exactly where each one went wrong.
4. Designing the Game. The technical side, inside the game: foundations, content, metagames, pacing, progression and worlds that last.
5. Building, Sharing and Growing. The technical side, around the game: the designer's job, the design process, working with people, marketing and monetization, the subjects that need careful handling, putting it all together, and growing as a designer.

You can jump straight to whatever topic you need, and the contents list is there to help you find it again when you want to refresh something mid-project. But read the first two parts before the technical ones. I'll say this more than once in the book, because it's true: the technical side is useless without the mindset. The tools only work when you know what you're using them for.

Game design is full of abstract concepts#

Game design is itself an abstract concept, and everything related to it is full of abstract concepts too. An abstract concept is an idea that has no real, physical existence. It exists only as a man-made idea, like "beauty", "courage", "truth", "rules", "revenge" or "attraction".

The things I'll be explaining are complicated and abstract, so they may not be easy to understand at first. Because of that, I'll explain them in a lot of detail, and more than once, in different ways, to make sure they're understood properly. If it feels like I'm repeating myself, that's on purpose. I'd rather say something three ways than have one of them misunderstood.

Multiple words for a single thing#

Language is unfortunately easy to misinterpret, because words mean different things in different contexts. So at times I'll describe a single thing with the structure "Word1/Word2/Word3", to focus its meaning with several words at once. I want to make sure that message sent = message received.

Besides single words, I'll also describe whole concepts in multiple ways. You'll notice this when I start a paragraph with "In other words…", "Basically…" or something similar. That's me making sure the meaning of a concept doesn't get misinterpreted by accident.

Do not underestimate the simplicity of what I say#

Often the best solutions are the simplest ones, and often the reasons something happens are more mundane/lame than you'd expect at first.

The methods and tools in this book are much too often glossed over, taken for granted or not treated with respect, precisely because they are so simple. Please keep this in mind whenever I talk about a method or a concept and you think it's too boring, lame or mundane to be true. Simple is not the same as trivial. Some of the simplest ideas here took me years of failure to see.

Controversial material ahead, keep an open mind#

This book does not follow tradition. Much of what it says is not common knowledge. I want you to know that up front, because existing works and traditions don't follow the same mindset I do, and that may make it hard to accept what I have to offer at first.

Keep this in mind: just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good.

Unknown word? Use a dictionary#

English is not my native language, but it's the one I've used most in my life, and I've gotten comfortable using words that may not be so common. Any time I run into a new word I've never heard before, I look it up. Even today I still come across words I've never seen, so I go to a search engine and type "define" followed by the word.

If I use a word you don't know, please do the same. It's a simple thing, but I've heard of people being mocked for using a dictionary, and that kind of thing blocks learning and understanding. So let me say it plainly: looking a word up is smart, not embarrassing.