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

We have explored, in this chapter, the most basic elements that form a game: game mechanics, and how they interact with each other, creating dynamics. We discovered the importance of playing many different games and being able to recall their core mechanics in order to find useful references for the creation of your own.

We then explained one of the fundamental theories behind game design: how to classify game mechanics using Jesse Schell’s taxonomy. We also learned some valuable design principles that will help us to adapt existing mechanics into something new and true to our game’s vision.

With this solid base taken on board, we’re ready to move to the next chapter, where we’re going to learn an even more difficult art: the creation of new mechanics and the search for innovative gameplay.