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

Preparing a Game Concept

Every game starts with a concept, an idea of what the player experiences will be—a vision of a world coming to life on screen. The challenge, once this idea takes shape in the creator’s mind, is to fix it and communicate it to everyone involved in the game development process.

In this chapter, we’re going to learn how to write a game concept and your responsibilities as a game designer in the process of doing so.

We are going to cover topics such as the following:

  • What is a game concept?
  • Structure of a game concept document
  • Knowing your competition
  • Understanding the ideation process

We are going to use some practical examples from real-life scenarios, and you will be able to follow the tips in each paragraph of this chapter and create your own game concept, based on your own idea or an existing game.