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

The birth of a video game character

We established that our game is the kind that requires characters. Where do we start?

Let’s have a look at one of the simplest video games (and yet, one of the most influential of all time) – Space Invaders. It features only five characters – one is the ship controlled by the player and the other four are the enemies – small, medium, and large invaders and the UFO ship.

There is probably a backstory to these aliens – who they are, where they are coming from, and why they are invading, but none of it is important for the design of this game.

Let’s see how they behave in the game. All the invaders have the same speed and the same attack, and they are all destroyed with one hit. But they come in different sizes that make them more or less difficult to hit. The UFO appears only every now and then, quickly crossing the screen from left to right, giving extra points to the player if shot.

Space Invaders...