10 Best Articles on Game Design
The most useful articles on game design from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 Game Design Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved on game design by Refind users in 2023 so far.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles on game design—all under 10 minutes.
A design practice for social systems
The following essay was originally posted in ACM Journal Games: Research and Practice ( Reposted here to provide a more accessible copy with better formatting. On grim winter days it is easy to fee…
Image to Pixel Art Converter | Convert Your Images to Pixel Art
Quickly and easily convert your images into pixel art with our online image to pixel art converter. Simply upload your image and choose your pixelation level to transform your photo into a retro-style…
Level Up: The Future of Video Games Is Bright
Success in the rapidly evolving game industry depends on scale, good franchise management, customer experience, and top talent.
Beware of Transparent Pixels
If you use sprites with transparency in your game — and you most likely do for the UI at least — you’ll probably want to pay …
Games that avoid capitalistic design
A look at game designs that avoid capitalist patterns.
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles on game design.
The colors of game design
What if game design could be summed up into four “primary colors” and their mixtures? This simple tool might help you organize your ideas.
What it Takes to Make a Game by Yourself
Macrocosm is a mobile game that takes you from atom to galactic empire across seven interconnected stages where making progress in one stage gives you a boost in the next! This post is a deep dive…
How Game Design Principles Can Enhance Democracy
Our democracies are already gamified. Our goal should be to do it better.
Behind the scenes of video game design, featuring Headland
Video game design is still a young enough practice to feel mysterious and discoverable. That's even more true for mobile games. Going behind the scenes of Headland, a new action-adventure game for…
The Future Of Mobile Web Design: Video Game Design And Storytelling — Smashing Magazine
As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s "story." This article suggests techniques that can be used in web design.
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in Game Design, including:
Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈
An online magazine for designers and web developers. Questions? We've got your back: @SmashingSupport, @SmashingConf. Curated by Iris, Vitaly and the team.
UX Collective
Curated stories on user experience, usability, and product design. By @fabriciot and @caioab.
Noema Magazine
Exploring the transformations sweeping our world. Published by @berggruenInst. Pitch us: edit@noemamag.com
Tobias van Schneider
A hopelessly inquisitive man. Occasional multi-planetary designer @NASA From me to you → http://vanschneider.com/vip ✣ http://mymind.com ✣ http://Semplice.com ✣ http://Carbonmade.com
VentureBeat
Obsessed with covering transformative technology.
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
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The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Which sources does Refind monitor on game design?
We monitor hundreds of sources on game design, including Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈, UX Collective, Noema Magazine, Tobias van Schneider, VentureBeat, and many more.
Can I submit a link?
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