I used to teach game AI. Most of the articles I read are badly researched, incomplete, and full of opinions of the author based on whatever they noticed trying things randomly in their game.
This article, on the other hand, is comprehensive and very well-written. Anyone interested in this topic should give it a read.
This might be because games are a young medium, but I find a lot of “primers” on game design to feel like subjective reflections of the author’s ludography. The sort of fundamentals a level designer for a 90s first-person shooter would give seem very different from a 2010’s indie platformer dev or a big-budget JRPG producer. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of insight that’s indifferent to genre or team size yet.
This article, on the other hand, is comprehensive and very well-written. Anyone interested in this topic should give it a read.