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

Designing Systems and Features

Now that we have a clear understanding of game mechanics, it’s time to learn how to combine them into systems and features. We have studied the ingredients and we are now ready to mix and match them to create all kinds of recipes!

Sometimes, the terms System and Feature are used interchangeably, and again, giving formal definitions is something that we would like to avoid in this book. From a practical point of view, and looking at the ways we have seen these terms used over more than a decade in game design, we can say the following:

  • A System is a set of interconnected mechanics that interact with each other to create complex gameplay dynamics
  • A feature is a broad term used to describe an aspect of the game that will be experienced by the player

A perfect example of a System would be a Role-Playing Game’s (RPG’s) battle system, which integrates mechanics such as health points, weaponry effects, damage calculation...