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

Quality assurance

One thing must be immediately clarified: QA doesn’t happen in the final phase only. It must start as soon as a game design becomes software.

Postponing QA to a later stage, or not having QA testers embedded in the game development team from the start is a common reason for the final 10% becoming 80%.

We are including QA in this chapter because it is a critical part of any game project’s closure and certain QA passes can only be done once the game is complete. It is only at this stage that a game can get the so-called Gold Master status, which means there is a build of the game that has passed all the publisher’s and platform’s requirements and has a bug rate below a certain threshold. Remember? We talked about the Gold Master in the first chapter of this book, Chapter 1, Introducing the Game Production Process.

There are different methodologies for game testing, each dedicated to a particular area of the game.

Most of them are...