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

Tools and setup

Even the best live ops teams will have a hard time running their game without the help of efficient tooling and bullet-proof infrastructure. Let’s run through the basics.

Content management system (CMS)

The CMS encapsulates any tooling that empowers designers, live ops managers, and any other non-programmers to create, change, and deploy game content.

From game and level editors to bespoke configuration tools, config files, and online spreadsheets, the fate of your CMS will depend on your game engine and data architecture. Live ops tooling cannot be an afterthought, so make sure to communicate your content management intentions early and request any tools you may need throughout production.

With a well-integrated CMS, editing files is quick, error-free, and well-visualized. Moreover, deploying new balancing tweaks, levels, missions, events, localization files, items, and so on should be done in the CMS alone and require no new game code.

New graphical...