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

Scoping practices

The best way to approach scoping is by deconstructing the game from the top and defining the critical progression path of the player. Think of the final experience you want to deliver or the story you want to tell. Thinking about levels or any other units of player progress, can you define the minimal, optimal, and nice-to-have quantities?

How much new content (obstacles, non playable characters aka NPCs, game mechanics, and so on) will you need on each part of the critical path to keep things interesting? By dividing player experience into chunks, you’ll be able to easily estimate the amount of all interdependent elements.

Content lifespan

The content lifespan is a document that lists every significant piece of content and maps it against a player’s journey in the game. It allows people to plan the production, estimate which elements are needed first, and identify the areas that have too many or too few new elements.

Unless you’re...