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

Live operations

The key objectives of any business are to build, retain, and monetize its customer base. This means that releasing a quality product is just the beginning!

You’ll need to maintain a level of support for your game as soon as it becomes permanently available to the public. This could be a public beta, Steam early access, or a so-called soft launch (low-key deployment in a few handpicked territories, for example, Australia, Netherlands, Canada, or the Philippines).

The success of any live title depends on the publisher’s ability to double down on their investment and maintain a dedicated team to execute the key aspects of live ops:

  • Content and feature updates: Keeping the game feeling fresh, bug-free, and relevant
  • Balancing improvements: Addressing both dominant and underplayed strategies based on analytics and player sentiment
  • Customer support: Creating and policing your in-game and online community, and sharing customer sentiments...