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

From paper to digital


In our specific case, bringing the prototype to the digital game was a fairly easy and quick job.

As the game was already developed to a playable stage, the main job was to modify the current game system to reflect the new changes. Of course, we had to adapt the rules from the paper prototype to the digital game logic, implement them in the quickest and efficient way, play, and iterate:

The cards from the paper prototype were implemented in the digital game

Abstraction versus reality

After we implemented the prototype principles in the actual game, we were ready to start over with the iterations.

In fact, what has been proved on paper was just a quick way to commit to a more serious prototype. It wasn't a definitive answer that the system would have worked. Think about paper prototyping as a green light for the actual digital prototyping.

The digital prototype was replicating quite well the experience that we had on paper, but some improvements became obvious and necessary...