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

Creating Characters

It is time to see how characters are created and managed in the game world. It is no coincidence that we discussed how to write characters and their stories first in Chapter 8, Designing Compelling Stories for Games. Writing a character is just the beginning, and it is a game designer’s responsibility to translate their essence into an entity that makes sense in the game world and its rules.

It is easy to think of a game character as the main character, the one the player controls. However, video games are mostly populated by characters that cannot be played – allies and enemies, in fact, are often the real stars and sometimes even more memorable than the protagonist.

This is nothing new; great supporting characters are distinctive of any good story! Traditionally, characters that remain stuck in our hearts do so for three main reasons – the way they are written, how they look, and (in the case of movies) the way actors perform them.

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