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 paper prototype case study

We will examine in detail a case study from my personal work experience at Another Place Productions. At a certain point during the development of our game BattleHand Heroes, we had to address an unexpected problem. This game was a sequel to our first hit game, BattleHand, and the combat system that was good enough for the first title was proving problematic in the new game.

Questioning a combat system

BattleHand: Heroes is a turn-based RPG in which a player builds a team of heroes, each with a unique deck of cards to fight. The combat system that worked quite well in the original game was lacking the depth to engage a new generation of players.

The first game was released in 2015, and players’ tastes and expectations for games always evolve, which game design needs to keep up with. Players struggled to understand the tactical implications of choosing among the cards at their disposal, how to choose their strategy, and how to correctly react...