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

Putting it all back together


Once you have found your references, deconstructed them, taken the most significant elements as a base to develop your mechanics, and finally added or taken out whatever you needed to achieve your gameplay vision..it is finally time to test whether it really works!

At this point, you are probably not yet writing a detailed documentation to the rest of team. Most likely you are in some sort of prototyping phase. Especially with core mechanics, the only way to test your hypothesis (of fun) is to play them.

We will discuss later how to effectively prototype game mechanics and flows. For now, it is important that you understand that the process of creating new mechanics goes hand in hand with working software.

The only way to know if your character's jump needs to follow a realistic physic or not, what the speed at which it is performed should be, and the maximum height is to play the game and feel whether your design assumptions were right or not.

Or to better (and...