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

What is a prototype?

A prototype is a model built to prove a concept.

This definition is applicable to anything, really, not only games. Most of the products we use every day, from the keyboard I am typing on to the complex machines that can fly outside Earth’s atmosphere and reach other planets, are the result of endless designs, prototypes, iterations, and, most of all, failures.

Game prototypes are not meant to be representative of what an entire game will look like; if that were the case, we would discuss instead tech demos or pre-alpha development builds. If you have a pre-alpha build ready, that means you are at a later stage in development and have probably already prototyped your core mechanics to get to the pre-alpha stage.

Nonetheless, even at the later stages, you might need to address problems that were not obvious before. Maybe finally seeing how your game actually plays in the hands of a playtester – or even your own – raises questions about...