Book Image

Practical Game Design

By : Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci
Book Image

Practical Game Design

By: Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci

Overview of this book

If you are looking for an up-to-date and highly applicable guide to game design, then you have come to the right place! Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of game design with this book, written by two highly experienced industry professionals to share their profound insights as well as give valuable advice on creating games across genres and development platforms. Practical Game Design covers the basics of game design one piece at a time. Starting with learning how to conceptualize a game idea and present it to the development team, you will gradually move on to devising a design plan for the whole project and adapting solutions from other games. You will also discover how to produce original game mechanics without relying on existing reference material, and test and eliminate anticipated design risks. You will then design elements that compose the playtime of a game, followed by making game mechanics, content, and interface accessible to all players. You will also find out how to simultaneously ensure that the gameplay mechanics and content are working as intended. As the book reaches its final chapters, you will learn to wrap up a game ahead of its release date, work through the different challenges of designing free-to-play games, and understand how to significantly improve their quality through iteration, polishing and playtesting.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Character Statistics


How can we represent the attributes that make a character different from the others? How can we represent, in game, character's traits we have defined with a written description?

One classic answer is: "With statistics!" (shortened to just Stats). Stats are a numeric representation of aspects of a fictional character (or unit, or building, or even an entire galaxy). The concept of Stat was introduced in pen and paper RPGs, and indeed is extremely popular in RPG video games, but its versatility and universally understandable concept made stats incredibly useful in many other genres.

Stats can be used to represent the physical or mental attributes of a character, such as Health Points (HP), Strength, Resistance, Speed, and Intelligence:

Diablo is famous for the huge amount of stats and part of the experience is to optimize and max them out

Stats don't have to be numbers though. In The Sims 4, for example, you can define character attributes by choosing aspirations, which will...