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

Making Your Games Accessible

In the previous chapter, we learned about the user experience (UX) and best practices in user interface (UI) design. We’ll now learn how to make these, and any other parts of the game, more accessible; that is, easier to use, understand, and relate to.

To begin with, we need to find ways to create a steady and frictionless introduction to the game world and the rules governing it. We then have to ensure that the game can provide a highly playable experience to players that are less experienced, skilled, or capable (be it cognitively or physically).

Last but not least, even the best games often start in a bad place, and there’s no better way to find things to improve than to test our games on potential players. We’ll spend the final half of the chapter on the art of usability testing and arm you with the expertise required to plan and execute your very own playtesting sessions!

We will cover the following topics in this chapter...