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

Putting it all back together

Once you have found your references, deconstructed them, taken the most significant elements as a base to develop your mechanics, and finally, added or taken out whatever you needed to achieve your gameplay vision, it is finally time to test whether it really works!

At this point, you are probably not yet writing detailed documentation for the rest of the team. Most likely, you are in some sort of prototyping phase. Especially with core mechanics, the only way to test your hypothesis (of fun) is to play them.

We will discuss later how to effectively prototype game mechanics and flows. For now, it is important that you understand that the process of creating new mechanics goes hand in hand with working software.

The only way to know whether your character’s jump needs to follow realistic physics or not, what the speed at which it is performed should be, and the maximum height is to play the game and feel whether your design assumptions were...