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

Making Prototypes

At this point in the book, you might have realized that, practical as it may be, game design happens in a designer’s head first and on a document of some sort second, and only in the third step it is possible to shape it into a playable game.

To actually make a game happen, the designer has to get their hands on a tool that allows them to create working software. Not all game designers are programmers, and even if they know how to write code, designing and programming are two different jobs both requiring a person’s full attention (and the bigger the project, the harder it is to bend this rule).

That said, a playable game is not necessarily a finished, high-quality product ready for release. There is one technique that game designers can use to put together something that is playable without any rigid process, programming, or software engineering. It is a technique they can use on their own or in a group and allows them to test ideas and designs...