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

A step-by-step guide to prototyping

The following is a step-by-step process to develop an effective prototype. These steps can be used to prototype an entire game or just a single feature, or maybe just to evaluate a change to an existing system.

Step 1 – ask the right questions

Whether the prototype is for trying out a game idea or a new mechanic or evaluating and improving something within your game, you need to have a clear problem in mind and how you imagine the prototype is going to solve it. Never start prototyping if you don’t know what you need to evaluate or prove.

What would make a good question? And a bad one?

Usually, good questions are specific. Asking whether a mechanic is fun or not would be a bad question. What do we mean by fun? A better question would probably be, does this mechanic provide enough decision-making for the player? Are the choices meaningful? How does the experience support or enrich other parts of the game? How much mental...