GDC: A Critical Analysis of Wario Land 4

[Daniel Primed]

Last December I released a 600-page game design book on Wario Land 4. It's currently discounted to $4.99 to celebrate the game's release on the Wii U eShop. Here's a bit of an introduction:

Game Design Companion: A Critical Analysis of Wario Land 4 takes under-appreciated gaming gem, Wario Land 4 (2001) for the GameBoy Advance, and splays the meat and bones of videogame design and structure across nearly 600 print pages to understand their influence on player experience.

Author Daniel Johnson, in a radical departure from contemporary videogames discussion, examines Wario Land 4 in its totality—including mechanics, psychology, education, level design, and game feel—calling on evidence-based analysis to understand the player’s subjective reactions to videogames.

The book is broken into several main sections:

Need to Know
-I introduce the game mechanics, game elements, and other important bits of info. This part is important to framing the rest of the book, but it's quite analysis-lite, so it doesn't require a heavy reading.

Digging Deeper
-I cover the key areas of Wario Land 4's design, like the mechanical balance, game feel, interplay, narrative and game ideas, visual/audio, psychology, etc.

Level Analysis
-The meat of the book. I take all of the concepts from Digging Deeper and explore them more thoroughly by analysing the level design.

Topical Essays
-A bit of a warm down from the level analysis. I talk a bit about the Wario Land 4 in respects to other games in the series, the mechanical differences between Mario and Wario, etc.

You can find some excerpts here. I was also interviewed about the book here and here.

If anyone has picked up the book, or is interested in picking up the book, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm thinking of doing a discussion session on the game in Google Hangouts sometime in the future.