Game Design Fundamentals
"Game design is the act of deciding what a game should be." — Jesse Schell [1]
Game Development
Game Programming Patterns
Design patterns are not invented so much as recognised: they are names for solutions that experienced developers keep independently reaching for, given as a shared vocabulary so a whole approach can be pointed at in a…
Engine Architecture
A game engine, in the sense used throughout this page and in Jason Gregory's standard reference on the subject, is the reusable runtime and tooling layer that abstracts away platform details so a team can spend its…
Building for Immersive Platforms: Engine Choice and the Risks the Engine Doesn't Handle
"Immersive technology" covers more ground than the headset on the shelf suggests. It's useful to place four things on one spectrum, by how much of the physical world a user keeps track of while using them: augmented…
Virtual Reality: A History of Premature Arrivals, and What the Evidence Actually Supports
Every wave of virtual reality coverage, going back to the 1960s, has opened with some version of the same sentence: this time, VR is finally here. It was said about a fairground-style arcade machine in the early 1960s…
Game AI
"Game AI is not about intelligence — it's about the illusion of intelligence that creates engaging gameplay." — Steve Rabin [1]
Goal-Oriented Action Planning
Most of the AI we met on the Game AI page is reactive : steering behaviours respond to what is around the agent right now, and pathfinding answers "how do I get there?". Goal-Oriented Action Planning answers a more…
Being the God of a Virtual World: Bartle's "How to Be a God"
Bartle's framing is disarmingly direct: anyone who designs a virtual world has, functionally, "absolute control over a reality" — which is what makes a god a god. Philosophers and theologians have debated the nature of…