FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Core Mechanics
Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility... When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.
—Don DeLillo, End Zone
Sports games present a number of design issues that designers of other kinds of games rarely encounter. This section covers issues raised by the physics, AI, athlete skill ratings, and other aspects peculiar to sports games.
Switching into arcade mode skews the play toward lots of action and relatively few slow-paced game states, such as strikeouts or walks. Arcade mode makes the game more exciting at …
The Secret of Monkey Island, now nearly 20 years old, remains worth studying because it spawned a highly successful franchise. Although it is ostensibly set on a Caribbean island in …
In single-player games, the player competes against the computer, so the computer has to have enough artificial intelligence (AI) to be a good opponent; building the AI for a complex …
