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

What is level design?

Level design is the process of creating playable content that serves as a medium for delivering gameplay and storytelling experiences to players. Some games rely on carefully crafted and strictly planned levels/maps/stages/missions. Others leave room for randomization but still require human input to create puzzles, challenges, enemy spawn rules, pre-assembled level chunks, and even high-level world-building rules.

The craft of level design lives on a flexible cross-section between game design, storytelling, and art. Depending on the needs of the project and team structure, a level designer will either take care of the entire level design from start to finish or ask for artistic input from environmental artists, who’ll take care of the visual side of things for them. In smaller teams, it’s quite common to have a generalist game designer tackle level-design tasks.

Depending on the game you’re working on, the tools you’ll use to...