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

From paper to digital

In our specific case, bringing the prototype to the digital game was a fairly easy and quick job.

As the game was already developed to a playable stage, the main job was to modify the current game system to reflect the new changes. Of course, we had to adapt the rules from the paper prototype to the digital game logic, implement them in the quickest and most efficient way, play, and iterate:

Figure 7.7 – The cards from the paper prototype were implemented in the digital game

Figure 7.7 – The cards from the paper prototype were implemented in the digital game

Abstraction versus reality

After we implemented the prototype principles in the actual game, we were ready to start over with the iterations.

In fact, what has been proved on paper was just a quick way to commit to a more serious prototype. It wasn’t a definitive answer that the system would have worked. Think about paper prototyping as a green light for actual digital prototyping.

The digital prototype replicated quite well the experience...