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

The Final 10%

Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule? It states that 80% of most effects are caused by just 20% of the possible causes. It is known as the Pareto principle, named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian scientist who postulated a mathematical distribution to describe the distribution of wealth in a given population, and applies to a variety of social and natural phenomena.

Some examples are as follows:

  • 20% of the clients of a company account for 80% of its revenue
  • 80% of a company’s sales come from 20% of its products
  • 80% of global world wealth is owned by 20% of the population
  • 80% of crimes are committed by 20% of criminals
  • 20% of the posts on social networks generate 80% of the traffic

It is a rule of thumb, but you’d be surprised how accurate it can be!

In fact, we can use it to describe what happens in videogame development:

80% of a game is made in the final 20% of the time.

I know, this chapter is titled The Final...