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

Narrative review process


We have discussed how making video games is about creating, evaluating, and iterating to the find the optimal solution. Jonathan Dankoff, expert in User Research, and Corey May, games writer, game a very interesting talk at GDC 2015 (Game Developer Conference https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022166). They pointed out the importance of the implementation of a review process in video games narratives, to assess and address issues with the narrative during pre-production and develop a game with a clearer storyline.

The framework was developed at Ubisoft, therefore it was meant for massive AAA productions, but the takeaways are very useful for games of any size. Underestimating the impact of the story is a common mistake, and the price is usually paid with stories of poor quality or the necessity to stretch the budget (both time and money) to sort out problems that could have been addressed early on with nearly no costs.

A very similar idea was proposed by Mike Laidlaw,...