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 evolution of game structure

For the purpose of this book, the game structure refers to the way different segments of the game link together and the journey players take during play. With the structure defined, it becomes much easier to divide the game into independent sections and assess the size, complexity, and dependencies of various parts of your game.

Note

As a designer, you need to decide on the player’s journey and the experience you’re offering. Do you foresee a single predestined path through your game? Is it branching? Or perhaps you only want to provide the players with various tools and let them take things from there? Is the experience designed to be highly replayable, or is it simply a puzzle to solve or a pre-determined story to be told and experienced? Answering these questions will tell you a lot about the structure of the game you’re making.

The structure of games not only depends on the desired gameplay experience but also on the...