The Game Designer’s Workbook

Hands-on tools, exercises, walkthroughs, and resources for new game designers. All you need is a pencil!

In The Game Designer’s Workbook, two experienced game designers, Bobby Lockhart and Eric Lang, walk you through design tips and exercises you can apply immediately to take your next game to the next level. The authors draw on decades of combined experience in game design, helping you ideate, storyboard, create fun and challenging levels, and more.

The book is structured as a set of practical exercises and examples to give budding game designers hands-on experience with the nuts and bolts of designing games. Equipped only with a pencil, you can level-up your skills in critical areas of game design. While you’re free to use a computer, a pair of dice, or to team up with a group of friends, The Game Designer’s Workbook lets you develop your skills whenever you’ve got something to write with and 10 minutes of spare time.

The book includes reflection sections that allow you to think deeply about your future game design practice, challenges that prompt you to modify and improve an existing game, break down games into their component parts to better understand their inner workings, and discussions of concepts common to all sorts of games.

You’ll also find:

• A link to a companion website that includes additional resources, like printable resources, extra dot grid pages, papercraft exercises, random number generators, and scaffolded work pages
• Explanations of cross-disciplinary skills useful for any aspiring game designers
• Stand-alone chapters you can tackle beginning-to-end or one at a time

The Game Designer’s Workbook is an essential toolkit for aspiring and beginning game designers, as well as anyone interested in games and game design.

BOBBY LOCKHART is a game designer specializing in learning games with more than 10 years’ experience designing games for all audiences, including children and adult professionals undertaking career training.

ERIC LANG is a human-centered designer who makes whimsical, award-winning, educational video games played by millions of kids around the world. He is the Art Director at the Field Day Lab based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.