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

Increasing accessibility


When thinking of making our games more accessible, we often narrow our focus to the overall pacing and difficulty of the in-game challenges. While balancing itself is important enough to warrant a whole chapter (and we've done just that in this book), we first need to identify the ways in which we can make the core of our product fundamentally more approachable.

Reducing cognitive load

Games that require good memory, observational skills, abstract thinking, planning, and fact association are all at risk of being very cognitively demanding.

High-level games of chess immediately come to mind as an example of a difficult mental challenge. And yet, the base rules and mechanics of chess can be understood and memorized by young children, making chess an accessible game.

Complex and mentally demanding games only become inaccessible if the player is stuck or struggles to learn the rules and improve. To make the game more accessible in this department, try the following.

Avoiding...