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

Playtesting

You’re likely to have encountered the term playtesting before, be it in this very book or elsewhere. In short, playtesting is the process in which you expose your game to the members of your target audience in order to uncover issues and design flaws and gather actionable feedback that can help improve the game.

However, there’s more to playtesting than simply having people play your game and tell you what they think. Varying circumstances ask for different methodologies, and knowing how to apply them is essential in obtaining and analyzing results.

We’ll now arm you with practical expertise that should help you decide on the following:

  • Which parts of the game to test and when?
  • Who should participate?
  • How to run a playtest session?
  • How to gather and analyze feedback?

What to playtest?

Anything that cannot be verified within the confines of your development team is a potential playtesting candidate. A well-prepared...