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

Level-design practices

In the previous sections, we have explained what level design is and how the process of creating new content can be approached. Now, it’s time for some practical tips and tricks that should help you with the design process!

Functional level design and realism

Game worlds range from highly realistic to completely made-up, and most fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Worlds do not become more believable because of visual clutter, high-resolution textures, and detailed geometry. They become believable if we can imagine the life that keeps on going when we look away.

Even the simplest AI systems can yield surprising results. Humans are naturally prone to connecting strings of random behaviors into larger, more meaningful stories, a phenomenon known as apophenia.

A simple way to create more coherent designs is to imagine the inhabitants of the world interacting with their surroundings. Don’t settle for a set of walls with haphazardly...