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

Terms of engagement

Before you begin thinking about designing, deploying, and running a live game, you ought to familiarize yourself with a large set of keywords and abbreviations used to describe various parts of the business. At first, these terms may seem a bit unwieldy, yet common language is essential when speaking about increasingly complex and fine-tuned products driven by dozens of people and hundreds of moving parts.

The majority of the list is dedicated to key performance indicators (KPIs). These are the metrics used to evaluate the performance of the game. KPIs often revolve around financial data, marketing performance, as well as the current size, health, and overall trends governing your player base.

We’ll now unpack several key terms and use this as an opportunity to provide additional insight into the challenges of building and running live games.

Basic stats

We’ll start with some of the most critical KPIs that almost every member of the game...