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

Designing Compelling Stories for Games

We have been discussing how to create a vision and communicate it to the team and how to design game mechanics and prototype them to answer fundamental questions as soon as possible in the development process. We have learned how to distill what we call fun into an interactive experience. It is now time to look at how to take all these elements and make them part of a narrative that can take our players into a virtual world and awaken their imagination, immersing them in the kind of experience that only video games can offer.

Video games (just like books, movies, or plays) can tell stories. Stories are one of the most powerful things human beings can use to communicate. The power of the video game medium, though, lies in one extra thing other mediums rarely have: the enormous potential of interactivity. There’s more: this potential is far from being fully known, understood, and accepted at large.

Consider that literature and written...