A Playful Production Process

For Game Designers (And Everyone)

Hardcover, 408 pages

Published Sept. 7, 2021 by The MIT Press.

ISBN:
978-0-262-04551-3
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5 stars (1 review)

This book teaches game designers, aspiring game developers, and game design students how to take a digital game project from start to finish--from conceptualizing and designing to building, playtesting, and iterating--while avoiding the uncontrolled overwork known among developers as "crunch." Written by a legendary game designer, A Playful Production Process outlines a process that connects the creative aspects of game design with proven techniques for effective project management. The book outlines four project phases--ideation, preproduction, full production, and post-production--that give designers and developers the milestones they need to advance from the first glimmerings of an idea to a finished game.

2 editions

A Playful Production Process

5 stars

1) "I understand this impulse to start to plan a game in detail from the very beginning. But doing so puts the cart before the horse. I know from my experience as a game designer that the correct path is to take one step at a time, and for me, when I'm digital prototyping, that often means starting by building a toy. A toy is an object that elicits play. It could be a store-bought toy like a doll or a ball, or it could, in the imaginative hands of a child, be a found object like a bucket or a bicycle tire. The important thing about the toy, for our present discussion, is that it's a system that either has some mechanical, interactive element, some narrative element, or both. For example, a ball will bounce when thrown at the floor, and we can try to catch it after the …