Fundamentals of Puzzle and Casual Game Design

by Ernest Adams

You understand the basic concepts of game gameplay, user interfaces, core mechanics, character design, and storytelling. Now you want to know how to apply them to the puzzle and casual game genres. This focused guide gives you exactly what you need. It walks you through the process of designing for the puzzle and casual game genres and shows you how to use the right techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your players.

Genres: Game Design

40 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 11, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Ernest Adams is founder of the International Game Developers Association, a game design consultant and author on game development.

He started out in the game industry in 1989 as a software engineer and holds a Ph.D. from the School of Computing and Mathematics at Teesside University for his work on interactive storytelling.

Reviews

[Carmen Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This very short and concise guide to puzzle and casual game design (mainly for mobile) is a good overview by an insightful expert who truly boils game design principles down to their absolute fundamental components, as the title states. The prose is accessible and clear, perfectly straightforward, suitable for beginners, non-programmers, or simply casual readers. Even more advanced CS developers will benefit from the best practices and core concepts as laid out in this book.

Although I found it somewhat short on discussion of actual puzzle design (and it contains absolutely no pragmatic coding content whatsoever), it does have a handful of insightful case studies that illustrate the author's points in concrete examples, and these should be instructive to the developer who wishes to design good puzzles. The instructions for creating your own design practice case study were a nice touch, giving you a structure with which to analyze puzzle and casual games with an eye to internalizing important concepts and practicing key analytical skills.

It was refreshing to be able to read a book on game design in one sitting (under 45 minutes for me), and the simplicity has the added bonus of keeping the content from feeling dated by obsolete languages or programs; just don't go into this expecting step-by-step instructions, deep dives, coding exercises, or anything more than the title promises, because in that you will be disappointed.

[Saruman Evil]

No matter how skeptical people are about games, I personally think there are a lot of games that are actually useful, interesting, and even educational. And they don’t have to be huge or complicated. You can find great options among browser games too https://playhop.com/category/educational . Probably more for kids, and if a kid wants to play something, then let it be something useful.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ernest Adams is the GOAT