Video Game Design

The Invisible Art

Mechanics, Systems, Player Psychology, and the Craft of Interactive Experience

First Edition | 2026

Written and designed with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic)

This textbook is free and open-source, published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA-4.0).

You are free to:

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Full license text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Built with mdBook. Implementation examples use Godot Engine (MIT License).

No game developers were harmed in the making of this textbook. Several were quoted extensively, however, and all errors in representing their brilliant work are the author's own.