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

Why a prototype?


The main reason why prototypes exist is that we need to narrow down the risk of making something that doesn't work. Imagine that you have infinite time and resources; what would be the point of creating a prototype? Why not just create the entire game, and if it doesn't work, we'd have all we need to try again? Prototypes exist exactly because we need to make the best use of the scarce time and resources we've got.

When we build a prototype for a game, we're generally looking at:

  • Whether a mechanic is engaging
  • Selecting the best idea from a set of alternatives
  • Testing the technical feasibility of an idea (where the idea can be anything from a full game to a graphics technique or AI algorithm)
  • If the user can navigate the game UI effectively and intuitively

Note

Please note that our first point is a huge one! To know what a fun mechanic is and how to judge whether yours is fun or not, you'd need to master everything we said in Chapter 5, Adaptation of Mechanics, and Chapter 6, Invention...