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The Reading Room

Spelunky

The designer's own postmortem — the rare Boss Fight volume written from inside the room, and the best account of how a roguelike actually gets balanced.

Author
Derek Yu
Published
2016
Publisher
Boss Fight Books
Pages
232
Shelved
Recommended

Most game-design books are written by critics who’ve watched the work; Spelunky is written by the designer who built it. Yu walks through the project’s eight-year arc from XNA freeware to console release, and the chapters on level generation and difficulty tuning are clear enough to teach from. The interior view that pairs with Suttner’s exterior one elsewhere on the shelf.