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

Tools for writing a GDD

There are many tools a game designer can use to produce game documentation; such choice is not only about preferring one to another but also about which one to use for any given feature.

Note

Depending on the scope of your game, the number of documents and resources you’d have to create will vary. The most important thing is to always have an index file where all the different documents and resources are tracked and referenced. Keep it up to date and always stay organized! During development, the game designer is the go-to person for any questions about the game; they are the experts. Being an expert on something that doesn’t exist might be a colossal challenge, but that’s your job and the more committed you are to this task, the more your team will benefit from your contribution.

As we already mentioned when we talked about modularity, there’s no need to have all your documentation in a single format. For the lore of an...