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

Understanding UX

UX refers to a person’s overall perception, emotional response, and attitude toward the use of a particular product or system. In the context of game development, UX can encompass anything that affects the overall feel of the game, except for the rule set and game content.

In practice, UX translates into input mechanisms (controls), menu and interaction flows, interface animations and sound effects, camera systems, and game feedback.

Let’s start by dissecting input!

Player input

The design and execution of input methods (that is, controls) can make or break your game. In this day and age, players expect the developer to adhere to a set of gold standards in the input department. For this exact reason, platform holders such as Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft have created their own set of guidelines to ensure that platform-specific input methods and control functions (that is, how to pause the game) are adhered to.

Nowadays, console action games...