About - Game Design Library

What is the Game Design Library?

I created Game Design Library to make it easy to find links about game design, both broadly (how do I design engaging mechanics in a puzzle game?) and specific (how do I balance combat in my JRPG)?

Who am I? Just your run-of-the-mill solo game developer. As a developer with no formal game-design training or prior game-design experience, I found it difficult to find game design topics online. Many articles, videos, and tweets claim to be about game design, but really just talk about game development - how to code procedural dungeon generation or animate a mesh with bones.

Instead, I wanted to find material about game design - topics as varied as:

Balancing difficulty in a JRPG
How to perfect your core game loop
Modulating difficulty over time so players don't feel underwhelmed or overwhelmed
Adding a unique twist to game NPCs to make them memorable
What kind of behaviour does loot-boxes encourage?

Since this material is readily available - albeit difficult to find in search-engines - I started collecting together articles and videos, describing and tagging them appropriately so they're easy to find. The results are Game Design Library (GDL).

As GDL is an ongoing project - I add links every day or so - contributions are always welcome! If you are interested, please take a look at the source data.json file, click edit (pencil icon), make your changes, and then open a PR so I can review/integrate them.