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

A paper prototype case-study


We are going to examine in detail a case study from my personal work experience at Another Place Productions. At a certain point during the development of our latest game, Battlehand Heroes, we had to address an unexpected problem. The combat system that was good enough for the first title of the Battlehand IP was proving problematic in the new game.

Questioning a combat system

Battlehand: Heroes is a turn-based RPG in which the player builds his team of heroes, each with a unique deck of cards to battle. The combat system that worked quite well in the first game, Battlehand, was lacking the depth to engage a new generation of players. The first game was released in 2015, and player's tastes and expectations for games always evolve, so games need to also. The players struggled to understand why they should play one card instead of another, how to choose their strategy, and how to correctly react to the enemy's moves.

Note

You might wonder how we actually found out...