Book Image

Practical Game Design - Second Edition

By : Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci
Book Image

Practical Game Design - Second Edition

By: Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci

Overview of this book

If you’re in search of a cutting-edge actionable guide to game design, your quest ends here! Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of game design with expert guidance from veterans with decades of game design experience across a variety of genres and platforms. The second edition of this book remains dedicated to its original goal of helping you master the fundamentals of game design in a practical manner with the addition of some of the latest trends in game design and a whole lot of fresh, real-world examples from games of the current generation. This update brings a new chapter on games as a service, explaining the evolving role of the game designer and diving deeper into the design of games that are meant to be played forever. From conceptualizing a game idea, you’ll gradually move on to devising a design plan and adapting solutions from existing games, exploring the craft of producing original game mechanics, and eliminating anticipated design risks through testing. You’ll then be introduced to level design, interactive storytelling, user experience and accessibility. By the end of this game design book, you’ll have learned how to wrap up a game ahead of its release date, work through the challenges of designing free-to-play games and games as a service, and significantly improve their quality through iteration, playtesting, and polishing.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
12
Chapter 12: Building a Great User Interface and User Experience

Software development models

We’d like to help you better understand the production process and the path a game project takes. To achieve that, let’s take a brief look at the two most common software development models, Waterfall and Agile.

Waterfall

Waterfall, as we understand it today, is a sequential approach to production with no space for iteration. The product is supposed to go through six rigid phases in a specific order (always trickling down, such as a waterfall):

  1. Listing all software requirements.
  2. Analyzing requirements.
  3. Designing the whole product and its architecture.
  4. Writing and implementing all of the systems and content.
  5. Testing and debugging.
  6. Operations, support, and maintenance of a completed product.

Since this process allows for no iteration, its use in games development is highly limited. It can, however, be applied on a small scale, be it on a part of a game’s content (for example, art asset production...