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

Character statistics, attributes, and abilities

What we have learned so far about characters exists in a gray area between game design and pure writing.

For a game designer, the most practical part of creating characters consists of designing their gameplay attributes. What these attributes might be depends entirely on the type of game we’re making.

Some games can rely heavily on numbers to represent each aspect of a character, as in classic RPGs such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Diablo. Other games might not have numbers at all and differentiate between characters’ abilities just by the actions they can perform and the context in which they act.

A great example of this is Heavy Rain, where each character has exactly the same gameplay as the others, but the context in which they act and the objects they interact with make each situation unique.

Statistics (shortened to just stats) are one of the most common ways we use to represent characters. Stats are...