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

The Fundamentals of Level Design

In this chapter, we’ll delve into the process of level design, a huge, nebulous topic that’s capable of taking up an entire book in itself. We won’t tackle individual tools or focus on a single genre; instead, we aim to provide you with insight into different aspects of the process as well as practical tips on how to best approach the creation of content for your game.

We’ll begin by deconstructing the level-design process, move on to level-based storytelling, and share a series of insights and guidelines that will help you plan and deliver well-designed levels for single and multiplayer games.

Strap yourself in; this is an important one, as even the most elegant rules and most polished mechanics can lead to poor gameplay experience if your level design is not up to scratch!

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • What is level design?
  • Understanding the level-design process
  • Level design...