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

Games as systems of conflict

According to a formal definition given by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in their famous book Rules of Play, a game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.

It’s an interesting definition, perfect for deeply understanding system design. It is easy to think about conflict in terms of war and triumph through competition, and this is indeed one of the reasons why games that represent fights and battles are so popular.

But by conflict here, we really mean any kind of problem that is artificially created by the game designer for the player to solve. So why are these conflicts so important for the players and how can we create conflicts that are fun to solve?

Conflicts can arise from three things:

  • Opponents
  • Obstacles
  • Dilemmas

You have to always keep these three elements in mind when designing your game because no good game can exist without them...