Mike Birkhead's Game Design Reference

# About Me

Hello, my name is Mike Birkhead, and I’d like to welcome you to my collection of Game Design articles. I am a 16 year veteran of the game industry, and over the years I have worked on a wide collection of games -- from Action-Adventure, to Fighting; from MMOs to Music Creation -- and along the way I have solved a wide collection of problems.

If you'd like to learn a bit more about me, head over to the About Me area. I am also available for consulting

# My Goals

Referential

Articles should be designed for all skills levels, and easily referential. Long articles are great for reading, but bad for reference.

Actionable

This site should allow you to immediately apply what you are reading to your job.

Interactive

I like to play with things to really understand them, so some articles provide interactive demonstrations of the concepts.


# Dive In!

Concepts ⟶

These articles focus on general and basic design concepts, and they make up the meat of this website. If you are wondering where to begin, this is the place.

Components ⟶

Once you understand the basic concepts, you can move here and go through the list of various components that go into making different systems. This is the most referential section.

Deep Dives ⟶

The last area is focused on building systems, and they tend to be a little long. Jump into this if you are already familiar with most of the basic I'm laying out.