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

Teaching game features

One of the eternal dilemmas of every game designer is: How do I teach players how to play the game?

In the early days of video games, there was a physical instruction manual that players had to read in order to understand how to play a game. Most players, of course, never bothered reading it and just jumped into the gameplay, figuring things out by themselves. That has been the standard for years.

With the video game audience growing larger and the medium spreading through more affordable and mainstream technology, the average video gamer is today pretty much anyone. It is therefore impossible to take for granted that they’d be able to learn a game just by immersing themself in it.

On the other hand, video games themselves have become quite complex systems. Learning a game such as Doom back in 1993 was a straightforward task: use the arrow keys to move, Ctrl to fire, and the spacebar to use objects. With those controls in mind, all you have to...