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

Events

Events are special time-limited activities designed to provide variety, increase player engagement, and potentially encourage spending. Events come in all shapes and sizes, from leaderboard competitions and tournaments to double XP weekends, Black Friday deals, special maps, and game modes.

The scope of your events will depend on your ambitions, capabilities, and the importance of the period in question. Some events require extensive planning and new content (it’s common to theme a large portion of a game’s assets around the Olympics, Christmas, or Halloween), while others can be done on a whim and rely on an established event pattern, a few banners, and a selection of available content.

Before you design and implement any event system, you’ll have to think of a few potential use cases. For each example you can think of, answer the following questions:

  • What’s the primary objective of the event? Engagement, the reactivation of lapsed...