When I read a book, I often underline useful passages. Later when I am finished reading the book, I compile a summary of these important lines.

I am an Unreal Engine 5 game developer and this is 21 quotes from the book written by Tynan Sylvester, an INTP millionaire gamedev. I searched for INTP gamedev writers and this book was appraised by many. I used the money that my dying grandfather gave me as a Christmas gift to buy this book. My memento of his soul lives in my copy of the book. Let his will flow through my future gamedev ideas.

1. These situations can be kept more interesting by not telling players everything, and instead rationing out information in a structured way to create suspense.
2. The true parts of these statements (feedback from testers) are the raw emotions behind “I liked it” and “It wasn’t fun”
3. So games that teach players to build, socialize, and fight will always have the broadest impact (values that shift loneliness to togetherness and poverty to wealth)
4. To achieve sustained success, a game must use its new technology to unlock interactions and situations that could not have been experienced before (example: Doom)
5. Games narratives are laden with clichés. The player character is an amnesiac. Or a super-soldier. One of the worst clichés is the crate (loot crate, they use the Start to crate metric as metric for bad games)
6. … it is the reason most limitless games are multiplayer — because a person can learn nearly any game system, but he can never fully understand another human mind (timeless game example: Chess, multiplayer games in general)
7. In a mechanics-driven experience, this is healthy, since exploring systems is a major driver of meaning.
8. Ignoring is, where possible, often better than disallowing or punishing because the player feels less controlled, and the behaviour stops quickly when the player gets no interesting reaction. Players understand the game mechanics have limits; it’s often better to make those limits simple, obvious, and dull than it is to try to camouflage them (example: jumping on boss’s table, NPC does not react)
9. Understanding decisions is critical in game design because decisions are the only emotional trigger that is unique to games
10. The heart of games is in interactivity and the heart of interactivity is the moment of decision.
11. We can avoid such shelf moments (nothing to look forward to in the game, players shelves it) by superimposing several fixed ration schedules.
12. The key to superimposing reward schedules is that the player must not be allowed to concentrate his efforts on just one reward schedule.
13. They mean that we should not just toss rewards willy-nilly into every game experience, hoping for a free motivation boost. Used haphazardly, extrinsic rewards degrade, distort and destroy the core experience of play. The player may be motivated, but the motivations is a shell of action without a core of feeling (money, credits rewards for a previously fun activity)
14. Redundancy — we can do this sneakily so that players don’t notice. For example, we place the same audio log in five different places, but once player listens to one of them, we have the others silently disappear.
15. Most players will never understand why a game feels the way it does. They will credit the graphics or balance for successes that were actually won in the input system.
16. Fine-tuning Half-Life: Toward the middle of the project, once the major elements were in place, it became mostly a matter of fine-tuning. We automatically recorded player’s position, health, weapons, time and any major activities such as saving the game, dying, being hurt, solving puzzles, fighting monsters etc. We then graphed the results to find places where player spent too long without any encounters (boring), too long with too much health (too easy) or the opposite (too hard). This gave us a good idea where to add the goodies.
17. Start at the bottom of the dependency stack and work upward through iteration loop (about dependency stacks).
18. “You are trying to get to the moon. You should be aiming for Jupiter. If you aim for Jupiter, you will definitely get to the moon” — Jim Henson
19. “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon” — Napoleon
20. Games are mental models for pieces of life.
21. A game is not a chain of events like a story. It’s a system. It crystallizes some part of the world into a set of mechanics and packages them up for us to play with