Chapter 40 — Further Reading

The capstone's further reading is a career-long reading list. Some items are books; some are websites, channels, or archives. The goal is not to read all of them — the goal is to have a durable library of places to return to as specific questions arise across the decades of design work ahead. Start with two or three. Add others as your work raises them.

Post-Mortem Archives

Game Developer Magazine (1994-2013) post-mortem archive. Available at gamedeveloper.com (formerly Gamasutra). Hundreds of post-mortems spanning two decades of game development, written by lead designers and studio heads reflecting on shipped projects of every scale. The archive is the most valuable free design-craft resource on the internet. Search by game title or studio. Read five before you write your own; read fifty over the first five years of your career. Classic entries worth starting with: Lucas Pope on Papers, Please; Eric Barone on Stardew Valley; Matt Thorson and Noel Berry on Celeste; Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy on Kentucky Route Zero; Jonathan Blow on Braid; Mike Bithell on Thomas Was Alone.

GDC Vault. The Game Developers Conference records every talk given at the annual conferences and publishes them at gdcvault.com. Many talks are free; others require a paid subscription. The "Postmortem" track is the most directly relevant to this chapter — dozens of hour-long deep-dives by designers who shipped significant projects, with slides, on-stage reflection, and Q&A. The "Design" and "Independent Games Summit" tracks are also rich. If you can only afford one subscription in your first year post-ship, GDC Vault is the one.

Indie post-mortem devlogs. Individual designers maintain devlogs on their itch.io pages, personal sites, or Substacks. These are shorter and more continuous than the formal Gamasutra post-mortem — weekly or monthly updates on an ongoing project, followed by a post-launch retrospective. Good examples: Tom Francis's devlog for Gunpoint and Heat Signature on pentadact.com; the Failbetter Games blog for Fallen London / Sunless Sea; the Daniel Mullins devlog for Pony Island and Inscryption. The continuous-devlog format is worth studying in its own right as a way of working in public.

Portfolio Inspiration

Derek Yu — derekyu.com. The creator of Spelunky. A plain, enduring blog-and-project-list site. Nothing flashy. No animated backgrounds. Fast load time. Clear information hierarchy. Study this site as the "competent minimalism" ideal. Your portfolio should work the way this one works — findable, navigable, gets out of its own way.

Matt Thorson — current property linked from celestegame.com and Extremely OK Games. Thorson's web presence has migrated across Tumblr, Twitter, and his studio's site, but the through-line is a clear demonstration of a career across shipped titles — An Untitled Story, Jumper, TowerFall, Celeste, Celeste 64, Earthblade. Study how a shipped-game list becomes a portfolio over years. Your portfolio at year ten will ideally look like this.

Tom Francis — pentadact.com. The creator of Gunpoint and Heat Signature. Tom was a journalist at PC Gamer before becoming a designer, and his portfolio doubles as a writing portfolio. Devlog posts, game pages, essays, videos. The continuous-devlog-as-portfolio model. Also notable: Francis writes about design thinking at a level of clarity that makes his blog useful beyond just his own games.

Pippin Barr — pippinbarr.com. An experimental game designer and professor. His site lists dozens and dozens of small short-form games, each with a page and a playable build. The "career-as-archive" model — a portfolio that documents sustained practice across hundreds of projects rather than highlighting a few headline titles. Worth studying if your career might go in an experimental or academic direction.

Arvi Teikari — hempuli.com. The creator of Baba Is You. Another clean, archival personal site with a long list of small projects leading to a breakthrough. The site visually communicates the designer's specific aesthetic — hand-drawn, minimal, a little odd — which is itself a portfolio statement.

Career Resources

Games Jobs Direct — gamesjobsdirect.com. A curated job board for game industry roles. Less cluttered than LinkedIn, better-filtered than Indeed. Check weekly. The site is UK-centric but lists roles globally.

Work With Indies — workwithindies.com. A job board focused specifically on indie and mid-size studio roles. Smaller pipeline, higher signal-to-noise ratio. Good for finding roles that LinkedIn does not surface.

IGDA (International Game Developers Association) — igda.org. Professional association with local chapters in many cities, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) on specific topics, a job board, and annual reports on industry trends. Membership is inexpensive; chapter events are often free. The most useful entry point into the industry's professional layer if you do not have existing connections.

"Working in Games" community resources. Game Design Skills podcast by Brian "Psychochild" Green. The Game Developer's Compendium newsletter. The r/gamedev wiki's "breaking in" section. Various Discord servers' #career-advice channels. Collectively, these resources cover the practical questions of finding roles, negotiating offers, and navigating the first few years of a career that the formal resources above do not address as specifically.

Communities for Continued Practice

itch.io game jams. The most accessible way to keep shipping after your first game. Dozens of jams running at any time on itch.io/jams, ranging from 48-hour speed jams to month-long thematic jams. Participation is free; the social reward is meaningful. Jams are where many of your long-term collaborators will come from.

Ludum Dare — ludumdare.com. The longest-running regular game jam (since 2002). Triannual, 48 or 72 hours depending on division, with a theme announced at the start. Thousands of participants, tens of thousands of historical entries. A single Ludum Dare entry per year is a sustainable practice that builds a back catalog alongside your main projects.

GMTK Game Jam. Mark Brown's annual jam, held each summer, drawing tens of thousands of participants. Mark Brown is one of the most-respected design educators on YouTube (see below), and the jam's themes tend to produce unusually interesting entries. Worth participating in at least once.

Ongoing Learning — Video and Podcast Resources

Mark Brown — Game Maker's Toolkit (YouTube). The most important design-education channel on YouTube. Brown produces in-depth design analysis videos — each 15-30 minutes, each focused on a specific design concept (boss fights, tutorials, difficulty, metroidvania structure, etc.). The "GMTK analyzes" series is a masterclass in how to write about design for a public audience. Brown's channel is also home to the annual GMTK Jam.

Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games (YouTube). The creator of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby runs a channel of short (5-8 minute) videos on specific design techniques. Sakurai is one of the most experienced game directors working in the industry, and the channel is a rare window into the craft thinking of a designer whose work has shaped generations of players. Every video is worth 15 minutes of attention.

Adam Millard — The Architect of Games (YouTube). Essays on game design, often focused on specific mechanics or genre conventions. Longer-form and more theoretical than Brown's channel; complementary rather than redundant.

Noclip (YouTube). Documentary-length films about individual games or studios, covering development history, design decisions, and post-launch reflection. Essential for understanding how AAA and large-indie projects actually get made. The documentary on The Witness, on Hades, on No Man's Sky's recovery, on Psychonauts 2 — all among the best game documentaries ever produced.

Game Maker's Notebook (podcast, Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences). Interviews with game industry veterans. Slower-paced than most game podcasts, with designers and executives who have shipped for decades. A useful complement to the younger-designer perspective of YouTube channels — the industry is older than the channels make it look.

The Classic Books

Jesse Schell — The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. The single most-cited textbook on game design. Schell organizes the craft around 100+ "lenses" — specific questions you ask of a design to surface its strengths and weaknesses. A book to return to across a career, consulting specific lenses as specific design problems arise. The physical deck of cards Schell sells alongside the book is a practical tool; many designers keep one on the desk.

Raph Koster — A Theory of Fun for Game Design. A short, illustrated, argument-driven book. Koster's central claim — that fun is the feeling of learning — frames the design craft in a specific way that has shaped two decades of discourse. Short enough to read in an afternoon; important enough to re-read every few years.

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman — Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The academic-leaning comprehensive textbook. Thicker and more theoretical than Schell, and more concerned with formal definitions and system dynamics. The book that game studies programs use. Worth owning as a reference even if you do not read it cover-to-cover.

Steve Swink — Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation. The most in-depth treatment of the specific craft of tuning controller-level game feel — the frame-by-frame decisions that make a movement system feel satisfying. If Chapter 5 of this book left you wanting more on mechanics-as-feel, this is the next step. Pair with the controller.gd tuning exercises in Chapter 8's code/ directory.

Tracy Fullerton — Game Design Workshop. A comprehensive book with a specific pedagogical approach: play-centric design, iterative prototyping, rigorous playtesting. Textbook-ish in structure but with excellent exercises. The book many university game-design programs use as their primary text.

Chris Crawford — The Art of Computer Game Design (1984). The first book-length treatment of computer game design, published in 1984 by a veteran designer. Historically important; some of its specific advice is dated, but the core design thinking has held up across forty years. Free online in scanned form from several archives. Worth reading to see where the discourse started.

Closing Note on What to Read Next

You have just finished a 40-chapter textbook. You are, quite reasonably, tired of reading about design. Take a break. Ship. Write the post-mortem. Build the portfolio. Play games for pleasure again.

When you are ready for the next book, pick something in this list. But hold one principle above all the others:

The next book you read about game design should be the post-mortem of the next game you play.

Play a game you care about. Finish it. Then find the post-mortem — or write your own, privately, if one does not exist. Every game-you-finished + post-mortem-you-read or wrote is a complete, self-contained unit of design education. You will learn more from that unit than from most textbooks. The textbooks, including this one, exist to give you the vocabulary for the conversations you will have with yourself about shipped games across the rest of your career.

Go play a game. Write the post-mortem. Then ship another one.

The craft is yours. The rest is practice.