Notes by Lex Toumbourou

An Interest Curve refers to the guest's interest over time during an experience (game, book, movie etc). The ideal interest curve usually involves an initial …

Schell says that the goal of a game interface is to "make players feel in control of their experience." ¹

We achieve this with immediate …

Coroutines in Lua are related to Generators (Python). They allow a function to be written to return intermittantly using the yield() function call on the …

A game balancing trick that Schell attributes to design Brian Reynolds (who in term attributes to Sid Meier): when tuning values to balance a game …

Schell says that a game economy is defined as simply: how players spend and earn money. He says a successful game economy has meaningful answers …

The opposite of innate complexity (in which complex rules need to be learned in order to play) and a desired property of a game. Arises …

Strategic actions that are "not part of the rules" but "that emerge naturally as the game is played". You can encourage emergent gameplay by adding …

Schell says that "the power of variable rewards over fixed ones has been proven in thousands of psychological experiences" (though no experiments were referenced). The …

Schell quotes Designer David Perry's key to addictive games: games should be designed so that players are doing 3 things at a time: exercising a …

The 50% rule states that you should plan such that if 50% of your budget were removed, you'd still have a shippable game. Then use …