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 level-design process

As we already know from the opening paragraphs, level design can span a variety of tasks, from defining enemy spawn patterns to creating puzzles, sculpting, and populating an environment or even defining beat-maps in music games. Nevertheless, there are some processes and steps that can be applied to almost any content creation task, be it in part or as a whole. These steps are set out as follows:

  • The premise: Setting up a high-level vision
  • The sketch: Expanding upon the design
  • Grayboxing: Implementing and iterating on gameplay
  • Art implementation: Dressing up your creation
  • Final polish: Bug fixing and final adjustments before release

Let’s go through all of them in detail and explore some examples!

The premise

Think of the premise as a succinct but persuasive sales pitch, even if the only person you’re selling an idea to is yourself. Usually, all you need is a short paragraph that highlights the purpose (from...