Book Image

Practical Game Design

By : Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci
Book Image

Practical Game Design

By: Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci

Overview of this book

If you are looking for an up-to-date and highly applicable guide to game design, then you have come to the right place! Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of game design with this book, written by two highly experienced industry professionals to share their profound insights as well as give valuable advice on creating games across genres and development platforms. Practical Game Design covers the basics of game design one piece at a time. Starting with learning how to conceptualize a game idea and present it to the development team, you will gradually move on to devising a design plan for the whole project and adapting solutions from other games. You will also discover how to produce original game mechanics without relying on existing reference material, and test and eliminate anticipated design risks. You will then design elements that compose the playtime of a game, followed by making game mechanics, content, and interface accessible to all players. You will also find out how to simultaneously ensure that the gameplay mechanics and content are working as intended. As the book reaches its final chapters, you will learn to wrap up a game ahead of its release date, work through the different challenges of designing free-to-play games, and understand how to significantly improve their quality through iteration, polishing and playtesting.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Designing UIs


The main objectives of any UI are to facilitate interaction and communicate the state of the game to the player.

Some products can get away with little UI other than game menus and occasional control prompts, while others try to avoid using any text in their interface and operate purely on iconography. The efforts to try and minimize the amount of UI and communicate the state of the game purely with game feedback and UX are applaudable and can result in very elegant designs.

Nevertheless, the more complex your game systems get, the more complex the states they produce. Deep and extensive user interfaces are often unavoidable, and knowing how to design them (or at least how to support and understand the professionals that do it for you) is a very important skill.

Listing and prioritizing information

As game designers, we often strive to provide our audience with deep, complex decisions. We sometimes think that, if players are confused, perhaps showing more of the stuff that's happening...