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

Diversity

I think spending a few words about diversity in video games is important. Historically, video games and the games industry, in general, have had a problem with the lack of diversity. With few exceptions, most of the main characters are white males. When they are women, they are too often sexualized (Lara Croft is a great character, but we all remember her physique in the first batch of Tomb Raider games).

When they are homosexual, they are stereotyped, as their sexuality has nothing to do with defining what they do and how they act. When they are of a different ethnicity, it seems they’re there as tokens, present just to say, hey, this game has a non-white/Caucasian character!

This issue finds its origin in two facts – the assumption that gamers, our audience, are mostly males, and the lack of diversity among video game developers.

To quickly address the first fact, in this day and age, this is simply a wrong assumption (historically, when video games...