The Game Designer's Workbook

Hands-on tools, exercises, walkthroughs, and resources for new game designers. All you need is a pencil!

In The Game Designer's Workbook, two experienced game designers, Bobby Lockhart and Eric Lang, walk you through design tips and exercises you can apply immediately to take your next game to the next level. The authors draw on decades of combined experience in game design, helping you ideate, storyboard, create fun and challenging levels, and more.

The book is structured as a set of practical exercises and examples to give budding game designers hands-on experience with the nuts and bolts of designing games. Equipped only with a pencil, you can level-up your skills in critical areas of game design. While you're free to use a computer, a pair of dice, or to team up with a group of friends, The Game Designer's Workbook lets you develop your skills whenever you've got something to write with and 10 minutes of spare time.

The book includes reflection sections that allow you to think deeply about your future game design practice, challenges that prompt you to modify and improve an existing game, break down games into their component parts to better understand their inner workings, and discussions of concepts common to all sorts of games.

You'll also find:

• A link to a companion website that includes additional resources, like printable resources, extra dot grid pages, papercraft exercises, random number generators, and scaffolded work pages
• Explanations of cross-disciplinary skills useful for any aspiring game designers
• Stand-alone chapters you can tackle beginning-to-end or one at a time

The Game Designer's Workbook is an essential toolkit for aspiring and beginning game designers, as well as anyone interested in games and game design.

How to Use This Book XI

Types of Exercises XIII

Additional Resources XIV

Setting the Stage 1

Reflection: Who Is the Game Designer You? 2

What Is...a GDD? 4

Remix: Tic-Tac-Toe (Naughts & Crosses) 8

Level Design: Mazes 11

What a Concept: Accessibility 18

Think Like a Game Designer 22

Cross-Training: Schematic Drawing 24

Breaking It Down: Capturing the Feeling 27

Randomized Game Idea: Pencil-and-Paper Games 29

Abstract Strategy 35

Reflection: A Gameplay Memory 36

Remix: Connect Four 38

What a Concept: Forks 41

Level Design: Dots and Boxes 44

Think Like a Game Designer 46

What Is...MDA? 47

Narrative Design: Abstract Strategy 49

Breaking It Down: Discretizing Time and Space 52

Narrative Design: Theming 55

Randomized Game Idea: Abstract Strategy 58

Story 63

Cross-Training: Storyboarding 64

What a Concept: Story Flow 72

Narrative Design: Roll and Move 74

Randomized Game Idea: Hidden Role 79

Breaking It Down: Anatomy of a Story 82

Sport 85

Reflection: Rules Heavy and Light 86

Level Design: Soccer/Football 88

Remix: Basketball 91

Randomized Game Idea: Sport 93

Breaking It Down: Playground Games 95

Cross-Training: Toy Design 97

Word Games 101

Reflection: Serious Games 102

Remix: Word Scramble 104

Level Design: Crossword Puzzle 108

Randomized Game Idea: Word Game 111

Remix: Hangman 113

Level Design: Word Find 115

What a Concept: Chain Reactions 118

Quantitative 121

Reflection: Player Feedback 122

Cross-Training: Probability 124

What a Concept: Emergence 128

Breaking It Down: Balance 134

What a Concept: Randomness 138

Narrative Design: Variables 140

Level Design: Race Track 142

Remix: Battling Ships 145

What a Concept: Randomness 2 150

Outside the Box 153

Reflection: Player Creativity 154

Cross-Training: Theme Park Design 156

Breaking It Down: Bodies 160

Narrative Design: Micro-RPG 163

Characters 165

Randomized Game Idea: Roll and Move 167

Cross-Training: Pub Trivia 170

Bonus Round 173

Reflection: Sources of Value in Games 174

Cross-Training: Wireframes 175

Breaking It Down: Drawing Games 177

Level Design: Sokoban 180

Reflection: Continuing to Grow 184

Further Reading 185

Appendix A: Random Dice, Cards, Letters 189

Appendix B: Additional Workspaces and Grids 191

BOBBY LOCKHART is a game designer specializing in learning games with more than 10 years’ experience designing games for all audiences, including children and adult professionals undertaking career training.

ERIC LANG is a human-centered designer who makes whimsical, award-winning, educational video games played by millions of kids around the world. He is the Art Director at the Field Day Lab based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Praise for The GAME DESIGNER’S WORKBOOK

“This book is a FANTASTIC way to start thinking like a game designer by solving the real problems that professional designers tackle every day. I love it!”
—Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

“The Game Designer’s Workbook is a welcome addition to the small collection of books that address game design in meaningful ways. It is an indispensable reminder that while game design is hard work, it should also be joyful. It invites readers to discover core concepts through playful discovery, and will be a valuable resource for anyone teaching game design. My only regret is that this wasn’t available when I set out teaching game design. My students would have benefited from its insights.”
—Scot Osterweil, Game Designer, MIT & Learning Games Network

“At least as good a game design education as you can get in the average university program, with significantly less debt.”
—Anna Anthropy, Award-Winning Game Designer, Educator, and Co-Author of A Game Design Vocabulary

“The singular achievement of The Game Designer’s Workbook is that Lang and Lockhart dive deeply into the mysteries of games, while rendering them utterly approachable. A must-have living sketchbook for game creators of all ages, The Game Designer’s Workbook is valuable for aspiring young designers, university students, and working professionals alike. The fundamental insights of game design — how systems work, how to communicate stories, how to prototype and test ideas — are relevant to just about any creative person working today. I look forward to playing through this book. You should too.”
—Eric Zimmerman, Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center, Co-Author of Rules of Play and Author of The Rules We Break