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

Creating Design Documentation

Writing game design documents (GDDs) is one of the main responsibilities of every game designer. The whole point of having a game designer on a team is to ensure that someone is taking care of putting everything about the game in black and white — someone able to define and communicate ideas, mechanics, and any other information the team might need to develop the game.

Many novice game designers (and game developers in general) look online or ask friends in the industry for a game design document template that they can use as a starting point for writing their own documentation. The general misconception is that if it worked for someone else, it would work for me.

As opposed to a game concept document, where there are established rules and information that must be included in a certain way (due to the selling purpose nature of the document), a GDD doesn’t follow a determined structure or format, and the information it contains can greatly...