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

Mastering Games as a Service

For free-to-play, episodic, and subscription-based games, a wide-scale release has always marked the transition from creating a product to running a service. But nowadays, even for premium titles, a degree of post-launch support is mandatory, and the days of shipping a box and immediately moving on to a new venture are over.

In this chapter, we will attempt to distill the knowledge required to turn your game into a successful service by establishing an update strategy, running events, addressing game balancing, working with analytics, customer support, and the tools required to operate your games sustainably. This chapter also acts as an important bridge to the next one, which is focused on the business side and monetization.

Now, to better understand the realities and challenges of live operations, we ought to first establish a common language!

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Terms of engagement
  • Live operations
  • ...