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

Summary

Writing and maintaining a GDD is a huge part of an everyday game designer’s responsibilities.

We have discussed the different tools for writing game documentation and their pros and cons, and we have defined the characteristics of a good GDD. Modularity, in particular, is what keeps GDDs relevant in the modern game development world, which is characterized by fast iterations and agile methodologies.

We also explored some practical writing techniques that game designers use to write effectively and on time. Now that we have learned how to write and communicate game design, we are ready to delve into the next section of this book: designing the gameplay.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to create game mechanics and how their interactions create what we call gameplay.