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

Scoping practices


The best way to approach scoping is by deconstructing the game from the top and defining the critical progression path of the player. Think of the final experience you want to deliver or the story you want to tell. Thinking about levels or any other units of player progress, can you define the minimal, optimal, and nice to have quantities? How much new content (obstacles, NPCs, game mechanics, and so on) you'll need on each part of the critical path to keep things interesting? By dividing player experience into chunks, you'll be able to easily estimate the amount of all interdependent elements.

Content lifespan

The content lifespan is a document that lists every significant piece of content and maps it against a player's journey in the game. It allows people to plan the production, estimate which elements are needed first, and identify the areas that have too many or too few new elements.

Unless you're working on a very open-ended game or a sandbox experience, it should be...