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

Increasing accessibility

When thinking of making our games more accessible, we often narrow our focus to the overall pacing and difficulty of in-game challenges. While balancing itself is important enough to warrant a whole chapter (and we’ve done just that in this book), we first need to identify ways in which we can make the core of our product fundamentally more approachable.

Reducing cognitive load

Games that require good memory, observational skills, abstract thinking, planning, and fact association are all at risk of being very cognitively demanding.

High-level games of chess immediately come to mind as an example of a difficult mental challenge. And yet, the base rules and mechanics of chess can be understood and memorized by young children, making chess an accessible game.

Complex and mentally demanding games only become inaccessible if the player is stuck, put under time pressure, or struggles to learn the rules and improve. To make the game more accessible...