Course Overview — Game Design Fast Track

This course runs in a single day. Each workshop is one hour, and what you finish in one hour becomes the input for the next. Miss one session and you can still follow. Attend all three and you go home with a game that has actually been tested.

Three workshops, three deliverables

Workshop	Goal	Deliverable
1 · Find the core	Find the thing your player will repeat hundreds of times	A one-page Loop Canvas
2 · Make it communicable	Turn that core into a document others read the way you wrote it	A one-page GDD
3 · Prove it is fun	Test whether any of it is true, before a line of code exists	A tested paper prototype

Nothing you write in workshops 1 and 2 is a fact. It is a hypothesis waiting for the table in workshop 3.

Worksheets, per workshop (print before you arrive)

Each workshop has its own worksheet. Every blank template is followed by a filled-in example from the demo game.

Workshop	Worksheet	How many
1 · Find the core	Loop Canvas	1 per person
2 · Make it communicable	One-Page GDD	1 per person
3 · Prove it is fun	Three-sheet instrument pack — A Prototype Brief · B Playtest Observation · C Change One Thing	1 each of A and C · one B per tester

The ideas running through all three

Four principles repeat in every session.

1. A game is what the player repeats — not what you want them to feel. They see the ending once; they press the same button several hundred times.
2. You cannot write an experience. You can only write the rules that produce one — the second-order design problem.
3. You cannot add fun; you can only reveal it by chiselling away the un-fun. Design is subtraction, not accumulation.
4. Documents and prototypes exist to answer questions, not to be complete. Write a section at the moment a decision needs it.
5. Skill in design is measured by how fast you discover you were wrong — not by how fast you build.

The demo game used throughout

Every workshop tracks the same example so you can see one idea travel through all three stages.

A first-person survival horror game where the player uses hearing instead of sight to decide when to move. The threat is never shown on screen, the lantern burns lower every turn, and the threat remembers the routes you have already used.

Its core verb is LISTEN. Hold onto that word — everything else in the course refers back to it.

Materials (download)

Lecture slides

• Workshop 1 — Core Loop and Design Pillars
• Workshop 2 — Game Design Document
• Workshop 3 — Rapid Paper Prototyping

Visual summaries (read before or after the course; large files, use Wi-Fi)

• Game Design Playbook — a visual digest of Scott Rogers’ Level Up!: the anatomy of a game, the theory of un-fun, choreographing the player’s narrative, the meat and the salt.
• Game Design Blueprint — a 15-page reference covering what this course has no time for: cameras, controls, HUD, level architecture, enemies and bosses, puzzles, difficulty, shipping and sequels.

Where these ideas come from

• Raph Koster — A Theory of Fun for Game Design — fun is the sensation the brain produces while absorbing a pattern; boredom arrives at mastery.
• Jesse Schell — The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses — the elemental tetrad, the interest curve, and the lens of the essential experience.
• Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman — Rules of Play — the core mechanic, and meaningful play as outcomes that are discernable and integrated.
• Tynan Sylvester — Designing Games — mechanics generate events, events carry emotion, and elegance means few mechanics producing many situations.
• Scott Rogers — Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design — the working definition of a game (player + rules + victory condition), innovation as iteration, subtractive design, the triangle of weirdness, and tiered design documents.

Note

The full texts of Level Up! and Rules of Play are not hosted here for copyright reasons — the two visual summaries above are the course-facing versions.