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

Pacing


Pacing is all about setting the tempo of your game and keeping the players engaged; it's the heartbeat of your game. Our ultimate goal is to utterly captivate our audience, to suspend their disbelief, and keep them in the state of flow.

The psychological concept of flow or the zone has been recognized and named by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and refers to the mental state of being fully immersed in the task at hand, even to the point of losing the sense of time and space:

The basic flow graph represents the relationship between difficulty and skill. As players grow more experienced and competent, they require more challenging tasks.

However, there's more to pacing than matching a player's skill and task difficulty! As you may remember, back in the midst of the chapter on level design, we mentioned that the pace of the game is often dictated by the intensity of the levels you create. The aforementioned intensity stems not only from task difficulty but also from mental and sensory...