game design patterns

intro

it can be argued that in the field of game design there are no consolidated "game design patterns", as it's more widely adopted by architects, designers and software engineers. however, there are proposals/compilations made by staffan bjork & jussi holopainen's "patterns in game design" (2004), joris dormans's discussions on it (2012), jose zagal's "game ontology" (2020), christopher barney's "pattern language for game design" (2021) that offer different approaches and are very useful references.

instead of having a long list of "best practices" and "common problems to be solved", the approach/patterns that tend to work well in one context/kind of game, might be the opposite for a different one. applying certain patterns or not to a game depends a lot on the creative direction.

nonetheless, there are some commonly seen patterns and threads amongst the researchers i mentioned. the first wiki i mentioned - bjork and holopainen's "patterns in game design" and their initial pattern categorization is a great starting point. it also has a great support tool for visual navigation.

a few patterns i'd like to highlight are the interface patterns and the ones i implemented as part of the l1f3 player toolkit.

websites like game UI database and interface in game also help with visualizing the most up-to-date/state of the art applications of some of these patterns.

analysis/application: l1f3 player toolkit

to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A0-nkB1fxQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXcjEk4Bebc