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

Establishing a game economy

At the heart of many games lies an in-game economy, which encapsulates all of the resources (including items, weapons, characters, XP, and so on) that players amass, exchange, and expend during play.

In a F2P game, the main goals of the economy are to both maintain a balanced and fun experience and maximize the lifetime value (LTV) of an average player in the most sustainable and positive way possible. This means we need to do the following:

  • Adjust the monetization strategy
  • Control the rate of player progression by managing difficulty, content burn, resource generation, and resource removal
  • Create and adjust real money offerings

Adjusting the monetization strategy

You may have a nifty shortlist of items and services to offer, but before you put a single number against them, you need to ask yourself these questions:

  • Who will be playing the game?: Can your game aspire to create a strong, dedicated fanbase with high retention...