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

Back in this chapter introduction, we described level design as a huge, nebulous topic. Many pages later, and in spite of the overwhelming complexity of the subject, you hopefully feel more confident about approaching the creation of levels for your games.

We started by describing the five-step approach to level design (from premise to polish) and explored the interactions between level design and storytelling. We then took a journey through a set of practical tips and tricks, from the use of realism and the philosophy of Kishōtenketsu (intro, development, twist, conclusion) to the complexities of light and darkness, practical use of space, and tips on multiplayer level design.

But that’s not all! The subject of pacing (a concept briefly mentioned during our example sketch for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare) will be expanded upon in Chapter 11, Balancing Your Content and Systems.

Now that we have our game worlds, we need to populate them. The next chapter...