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

A step-by-step character design

We are now going to do a design exercise and create a new character for a game you have hopefully played – Overwatch. At the time of writing the second edition of this book, Overwatch 2 has taken the place of its predecessor, and the character design you will see in the following section might seem a bit out of date. If you are curious, try to compare this design with the current characters in Overwatch 2 – what has changed? How would modify our proposal to fit with the newest chapter of the game?

Games with multiple heroes are perfect to experiment and test your design skills. You already have a solid base – an existing game with core mechanics that work. Also, you probably have some ideas about what is lacking or what would make a great addition to any game you like and play a lot – so half of the work is already done!

Read this part very carefully, and as soon as you finish, experiment with some character designs...