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

Summary

We have taken a peek at how narratives are designed for video games and how stories suit the video game medium very well. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Interactive storytelling is a huge discipline, one that a game designer should know but doesn’t necessarily need to master unless they want to specialize in writing or narrative design. For readers who want to delve deeper into it, we have established a few starting points.

We looked at two common types of narrative: the three-act story, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end, through which the tension constantly builds up and reaches a final climax, and the monomyth, which is used to represent the archetypal hero’s journey through an adventure that takes them out of their comfort zone into a new world of discovery and experiences, and back again.

We went through the structure of different narratives in games, both linear and modular, and we closed the chapter by looking at environmental...