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

What a chapter! This has probably been the most difficult one so far. We’ve been through a lot of concepts, principles, and examples. I suggest you reflect on what you have read before proceeding. Let this chapter settle in and go back to any part that you think might be worth re-reading; it’s a lot to take on!

Our journey started with understanding how it is important to come up with game systems that transform a vision into a playable experience. We looked at two fundamental studies about player types, the types of emotions they experience when playing games, and the importance of keeping these in mind when designing the game’s systems.

We learned how games are organized in loops and explored two of the most fundamental systems in games, progression systems and combat systems, and looked at some important principles of system design: holistic game design, emergent gameplay, depth, and complexity.

We briefly explored the art of teaching a game...