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

Tips for closing a game project

As we have seen, in an ideal world, the closing phase of a game project should take more time than the sum of each of the previous stages. But that’s unlikely to happen in reality—on the contrary, you’ll probably find yourself with much less time than expected to wrap everything up.

Here is a list of tips and practices to avoid sacrificing polishing, proper user testing, and, in the worst cases, procrastinating a game’s release:

  • Review the game concept and game design pillars: Cut anything that does not reflect them. The sooner this review is done, the better it is, but do not be afraid to cut a feature that appears to contrast with the original concept, even if it has been partially or fully developed.
  • Have a UX review: Let a professional UX researcher study your game. A UX review will provide you with extremely useful insights and a lot of actionable points to improve the quality of your game.
  • Get the...