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 purpose of a GDD

Documentation serves two purposes:

  • Providing the team with a detailed description of what needs to be done (communication)
  • Acting like a sort of encyclopedia of the game, where the team can keep track of what has been done, how and why it has been done, and what has changed (memory)

This means that the job of the game designer is not only to design the game on paper before any software is written, but also to ensure that everything that is documented is and remains up to date. Whenever something changes down the line or is not implemented exactly as per the documentation, it is important that the documentation is updated.

A great practice is to add comments about why (and how) the final implementation is different from the initial design. This scenario happens all the time in game development.

In fact, no game designer has ever handed their document to the rest of the team without being asked to modify or remove something that could be...