Deepen your understanding of The Game Development Strategy Guide with custom exercises
These Chapter Quests didn’t fit in the book, but were intended to help provide you with calls to action to start applying the concepts in the book by analyzing the market and your own work. Use this material to follow along as you complete the content in The Game Development Strategy Guide: Crafting Video Games That Thrive. Click on the chapter title to explore the full chapter quest. Perfect for educators and book clubs looking to ensure lasting comprehension and spark deep conversation.
Not an experienced gamer? Not to worry. Chapter Quests come with recommendations for games to try when called for.
Chapter 1: What Makes Us Play?
Apply the Motivators of Play to a variety of games to see how different games hit players differently.
Chapter Quest 2: The Fun Business
Chapter 2: The Living Business of Games
Determine the business model of a variety of current games, and review a bonus tool intended to help you determine whether you’re dealing with a traditional or live-service game. Bonus level: Cyberpunk 2077 discussion.
Chapter Quest 3: Company Detective
Chapter 3: Putting the Dev in Game Development
Pick 3 of your favorite games and look into how they were developed; see how many companies were involved and what role they played.
Chapter Quest 4: A Fruitful Game Loop
Chapter 4: Game Designer’s Toolkit
Use a grid of game genres to choose a genre you’re not familiar with, and explore 2 games from that genre. Play those games for a few hours and complete several prompts designed to help you deconstruct the core elements of gameplay.
Chapter Quest 5: Your New Player Journey
Chapter 5: Game Experience Design in Practice
Choose a new game you’ve never played before, and document your passage through the game’s user experience for the first 2 hours, keeping an eye on these helpful prompts for what to look out for. At the end of the 2 hours, reflect on what you learned. Bonus level: Triaging existing games for onboarding opportunities.
Chapter Quest 6: Don’t Go Alone
Chapter 6: The Why of Multiplayer
Challenge yourself to experience different forms of multiplayer gaming: ranked play, massively multiplayer online gaming, the tutorial of a sandbox-style user-generated content driven game, a party game with friends and family, and a cooperative game.
Chapter Quest 7: Story and Time
Chapter 7: Engaging Players Over Time
Choose a game where narrative plays a critical role in the player experience (examples are provided.) Play through 2 hours of the game while paying attention to specific narrative design prompts around character design, gameplay choices, and player agency.
Chapter Quest 8: Visions of Success
Chapter 8: Creating Immersive Worlds
Choose two different games: one with 2D visuals, one with 3D visuals. Applying what you’ve learned in the book, define what quadrant of the Spectrum of Gaming Graphics each game would occupy, and then explore online forums and tools to see how the community perceived these elements. Bonus level: explore the Elemental Tetrad with a focus on immersive elements.
Chapter Quest 9: Collect the Codes
Chapter 9: From Emergence to Prosocial Gaming
Explore what it means to be in a gaming community. Start by reviewing at least 2 different sets of gaming community guidelines and note the differences. Then, go to a streaming platform like Twitch or YouTube and look for streamers or recordings of streamers who are playing the games from those communities. Reflect on the differences you see from stream to stream, and on the ways your relationships to the games change as you watch others play and experience the game.
Chapter Quest 10: Window Shopping
Chapter 10: The Money Game
Look at two different free-to-play live-service games. What types of currency do they offer? How do their approaches to store offers differ? Reflect on your perception of value from store to store as you see how a variety of smaller monetization decisions show up in an aggregate marketplace.
Chapter Quest 11: Pin the Tail on the Game Economy
Chapter 11: Efficient and Ethical Economies
Choose at least 2 of the games you analyzed in previous steps and identify where they land on the Spectrum of Game Monetization, keeping in mind that “free to play” is rarely the only thing happening. Visit the Reddit forums for each of the games you’re analyzing. How does player sentiment support or contradict your analysis? For any games that offer loot boxes, take a moment to examine the loot drop tables.
Chapter Quest 12: Peeking at Platforms
Chapter 12: Gaming Technology Platforms
Visit 2 different game marketplaces: Steam and one of its major competitors like itch.io or GOG. Take note of what is shown on the main page. How many games are featured? How many popups and ads do you encounter? Which one would be most appropriate for your next game, if you were shipping on PC?
Chapter Quest 13: What’s Your Role?
Chapter 13: The Good and Bad of Game Dev Processes
Review the phases of game development and reflect on your specific role in each of these phases. Where are you needed most? Where do you need others most? Bonus Level: Conversation starters for cross-discipline connections.
Chapter Quest 14: In the Details
Chapter 14: Let the Right Ideas Win
Review the publicly available technical requirements for one of the major hardware platforms: iOS/Apple, Xbox, or Android (other platforms are not publicly available.) What is most surprising? How might you use a framework like MVP or MoSCoW to include these requirements?
Chapter Quest 15: Video Game Launch Party
Chapter 15: Failure to Thrive
Choose 1-2 upcoming games that you can track that have not yet launched. Add them to your wishlist, follow them, or pre-order them so you can get updates. Then, revisit this page for suggestions on how to journal your lived experience as a player going through this launch period.
