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

Pacing

Pacing is all about setting the tempo of your game and keeping the players engaged; it’s the heartbeat of your game. Our ultimate goal is to utterly captivate our audience, suspend their disbelief, and keep them in a state of flow.

The psychological concept of flow or the zone was recognized and named by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975 and refers to the mental state of being fully immersed in the task at hand, even to the point of losing the sense of time and space:

Figure 11.2 – Diagram of the flow concept

Figure 11.2 – Diagram of the flow concept

This basic flow graph represents the relationship between difficulty and skill. As players become more experienced and competent, they require more challenging tasks.

However, there’s more to pacing than matching a player’s skill and task difficulty! As you may remember, back in the Chapter 9, The Fundamentals of Level Design we mentioned that the pace of the game is often dictated by the intensity of the levels...