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

Finding the right reference

How can you create a game mechanic based on an existing one? How do you find the right reference to start creating your own?

The first step is to look for games that include mechanics and features similar to what you are envisioning for your game. Your game concept should give you a clear idea of which games you should look at.

At this point, you should have a clear idea of who your competitors are (as we have seen in Chapter 2, Preparing a Game Concept) and it is important to look at your competition’s game mechanics with special attention. This is for two reasons:

  • Here you will find the basic mechanics of your game.
  • It will give you a clear idea of how games similar to yours play. Your goal is to make something different in the end, not just copy and paste what’s already been done!

Let’s have a look at some practical examples.

Let’s say you are building a real-time strategy game and need to define...