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

Narrative

The Oxford dictionary defines Narrative as follows:

“A spoken or written account of connected events; a story”

See what I meant earlier in this chapter’s introduction? It’s already outdated! The narrative doesn’t have to be necessarily spoken or written... it can be told through images, both still (photography, art) or moving (motion pictures and, yes, video games!).

There is one common mistake, though: the belief that interactivity might change the basic rules of storytelling that have been set through millennia of human history. It doesn’t. The story is the goal, regardless of how it is told. So, the rules of a good story never change.

In fact, in this chapter, we will just briefly discuss how a good story is written. It is a huge topic that would need a few books in itself. As usual, I can never recommend enough that you pick up this topic and study it in depth if that’s what interests you the most. Not all designers...