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

Elegance in game design


One of the most important principles of good game design is elegance. We are going to talk about elegance in game design throughout the whole book, and it is a concept that hopefully you're going to assimilate in every chapter. In your game designer career, you are going to hear it all the time: we need an elegant solution for this, look at how elegant this tutorial is,such elegance in this feature design. What are they talking about?

If you look at the meaning of the word elegance, two keywords are widely used to explain what it is: efficiency and simplicity.

Games are extremely complex systems, so elegance in design is not a luxury, as the word might suggest, but a strict requirement. Elegant design means features and game mechanics that are simple to learn and hard to master. It means that despite the intrinsic complexity of the system, pretty much everyone should be able to interact with it. Elegance allows accessibility.

The classic example of elegance in game design...