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

Why a prototype?

The main reason why prototypes exist is that we need to narrow down the risk of making something that doesn’t work. Imagine that you have infinite time and resources; what would be the point of creating a prototype? Why not just create the entire game, and if it doesn’t work, try again? Prototypes exist exactly because we need to make the best use of the scarce time and resources we’ve got.

When we build a prototype for a game, we are generally looking at the following:

  • Whether a mechanic is engaging and fun
  • Selecting the best idea from a set of alternatives
  • Testing the technical feasibility of an idea (where the idea can be anything from a full game to a rendering technique or AI algorithm)
  • Whether a user can navigate the game UI effectively and intuitively
  • Whether a game economy is balanced

Note

Please note that our first point is a huge one! To understand what a fun mechanic is and how to judge whether yours...