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

Additive and subtractive design

Our previous Super Meat Boy jump example is a perfect introduction to the topic we’re going to discuss next: additive and subtractive design.

By taking out that gravity element, Super Meat Boy’s developers have subtracted from a classic jumping mechanic, while on the other hand, they have added to the mechanic by allowing wall jumping. Additive and subtractive design is the principle behind any adaptation of game mechanics.

Additive design, in particular, is what game developers have always used to create new video games. Expanding and improving existing game mechanics is the lifeblood of game design as much as introducing new groundbreaking ones.

Subtractive game design, though, is probably even more important.

We talked already about the less is more principle and how it should be applied throughout the whole design and its documentation. Applying this principle in game mechanics is not only a matter of elegance; it can help...