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

Game difficulty

It’s up to the game and level designers to create an experience that’s optimal for as many players as possible, and if that seems like a simple task, trust us when we say it’s not!

As will be established in Chapter 13, Making Your Games Accessible, our audience varies greatly in their level of gaming experience, real-world knowledge, physical and mental capacity, and even language proficiency.

From pattern recognition and memory to spatial navigation, reflexes, and hand-eye coordination, there are many skills at play, and in some departments, the gap between players can be huge. Moreover, some players like to be challenged, and others have little time and patience for a serious struggle, preferring to breeze through levels and experience the story with relative ease.

There are many ways of addressing this difficulty gap. Some rely on preset attributes and redesigning the game content, while others are fully automatic and respond to the...