Introduction to Game Design

This course is a part of Introduction to Game Design, a 3-course XSeries series from edX.

Game designers create the ideas and worlds of games—they design the environment, characters, game mechanics, goals and user experience. Successful game designers do this by applying the fundamentals of game system design and logic.

This course explains what game system design is, how it works, and how it relates to game mechanics, designing rules, and logical thinking and reasoning. Game balance is a crucial component of game design and development, so in this course we will focus on what game balance is and why it is important in terms of its relation to simplicity and complexity, dominant strategies, and skill and chance.

This course also dives into game balancing tools you can use to make your game a success, including risk and reward, physical and mental challenges, gameplay duration, and freedom versus control.

Topics covered include:

Game system design and logic

Game balance

Game environments

Game balancing tools

What you'll learn

• The categories of game mechanics and how to use them
• How to design good rules for your games and how logical thinking relates to game rules
• How to achieve game balance through various tools, including fairness, challenge versus success, simplicity and complexity, dominant strategies, and skill versus chance
• How to use other game balancing tools to affect game design and the user experience