A new book – Speed Boost: The Hidden Secrets Behind Arcade Racing Game Design

April 14th, 2021

I’m pleased to announce the release of my second book, Speed Boost: The Hidden Secrets Behind Arcade Racing Game Design. Once again, this is a digital-only venture. The book can be purchased for $USD5.99 at Gumroad and includes pdf, epub, and mobi formats.

Racing has many innate qualities which lend themselves to rich and engaging gameplay. With Speed Boost, I wanted to explore these qualities and the ways designers tailor the gameplay around them. Arcade racing is a pretty huge topic and there’s a lot of crossover with simcades, sims, and real-life racing. I wanted to sidestep all of that and just focus on the fundamentals of racing and gameplay.

Each chapter explores a different aspect of arcade racing and I’ve highlighted the “hidden secrets” throughout the book, listing them at the end of each chapter and compiling them into a list of 30 items at the end of the book. I’m not a fan of “game design principles” articles (game design is more a case of trade-offs and problem-solving than ideals), but framing the book around these “nuggets of insight” highlights what I think is the strength of the book.

Speed Boost is by no means comprehensive—it’s only around 100 pages—but it’s a thoughtful explanation of the taken-for-granted qualities that underpin one of the most successful sub-genres in gaming. I’m really happy with how it turned out and I look forward to hearing your comments and feedback. Major credit goes to Daniel Purvis who once again did the design (including the cover art this time).

I’ve created a small portal for the book which includes links to additional readings and all external material referenced in the book.

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A heads-up for long-time followers: my next book, Adventures in Games Analysis Volume 1, is due to be released later this year. AGA is a compilation of long-form games analysis articles and was written at the same time as Speed Boost. Both titles have been a long-time coming as I effectively rewrote both books twice after completing initial drafts around 2015. In the meantime, you may want to check out the online-only chapters. Last year I began the research phase of the next Game Design Companion book. I’m looking fourwaRd to sharing morE details next year.