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

Designing UIs

The main objectives of any UI are to facilitate interaction and communicate the state of the game to the player.

Some products can get away with little UI other than game menus and occasional control prompts, while others try to avoid using any text in their interface and operate purely on iconography. The efforts to try and minimize the amount of UI and communicate the state of the game purely with game feedback and UX are applaudable and can result in very elegant designs.

Nevertheless, the more complex your game systems get, the more complex the states they produce. Deep and extensive UIs are often unavoidable and knowing how to design them (or at least how to support and understand the professionals that do it for you) is a very important skill.

Listing and prioritizing information

As game designers, we often strive to provide our audience with deep, complex decisions. We sometimes think that, if players are confused, perhaps showing more of the stuff...