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

Approaching mechanic design

When designing game mechanics, there are two approaches:

  • Adapting existing game mechanics
  • Inventing new game mechanics

As we have said, the first approach is the most common, and for valid reasons! Hundreds of mechanics have been designed and used already, and there is no point in trying to come up with new ones for the sake of innovation.

Most of the time, your job would be about selecting the right mechanics from the ones you know and adapting them to the context of the game you are working on.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t be facing the challenge of designing new game mechanics from time to time. Also, sometimes, what makes a mechanic new or adapted is not clear.

Let’s take PUBG: Battlegrounds (PUBG), for example. This is the first Battle Royale game that featured a shrinking map as a circle closing toward the center of the map (to be precise, the first one was DayZ: Battle Royale, a mod by the same...