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 narratives for video games

We have briefly seen the structure of a story, but how is a narrative designed for a video game? And how is it implemented?

The first thing to note is that a game cannot be simply written and then played out by the system like it was a movie. A game narrative unfolds when someone actually plays the game, so mechanics and dynamics are as important as the story, if not even more so.

Interactive storytelling means that players should play and experience the story through their actions. Reading or listening to notes and watching cutscenes should immerse the player in the game world but should never come before the actual gameplay.

The idea is that, even in the most narrative-driven game, the player should be able to bolt through the game, skipping any reading, listening, or cutscenes... and still be able to make sense of the game story simply by playing it.

Not an easy task for us designers!

We have already seen in Chapter 3, Scoping...