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

Elegance in game design

One of the most important principles of good game design is elegance. In your career as a game designer, you are going to hear this all the time: we need an elegant solution for this, look at how elegant this tutorial is, such elegance in this feature design. What are they talking about?

If you look at the meaning of the word elegance, two key words are widely used to explain what it is: efficiency and simplicity.

Games are extremely complex systems, so elegance in design is not a luxury, as the word might suggest, but a strict requirement. Elegant design refers to features and game mechanics that are simple to learn and hard to master. It means that despite the intrinsic complexity of the system, pretty much everyone should be able to interact with it. Elegance allows accessibility.

Ben Brode, in his brilliant talk Designing MARVEL SNAP! at GDC 2023, defined elegant design as “mechanics that yield a lot of depth for a small amount of complexity...