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

Game structure


To have any chance of scoping and sizing your game accurately, you first need to define its structure. For the purpose of this book, the structure refers to the way different segments of the game all link together and the journey players take during play.

With the structure defined, it becomes much easier to divide the game into independent sections and assess the size, complexity, and dependencies of various parts of your game.

Note

As a designer, you need to decide on the player's journey and the experience you're offering. Do you foresee a single predestined path through your game? Is it branching? Or perhaps you only want to provide the players with various tools and let them take things from there? Is the experience designed to be highly replayable, or is it simply a puzzle to solve or a fixed story to be told and experienced? Answering these questions will tell you a lot about the structure of the game you're making.

The structure of games not only depends on the desired...