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

What is the purpose of a GDD?


Documentation serves two purposes:

  • Providing the team with a detailed description of what needs to be done (communication)
  • Acts like a sort of encyclopedia of the game, where the team can keep track of what has been done and how, and what has changed (memory)

This means that the job of the game designer is not only to spec out the game on paper before any software is written, but also to ensure that everything that is written must be up to date. Whenever something changes down the line, or it is not implemented exactly as per documentation, it is important that the doc is updated. A great practice is to add comments about why (and how) the final implementation is different from the initial design. This kind of thing happens all the time in game development. In fact, no game designer has ever handed his document to the rest of team without being asked to modify or remove something that could be implemented in a better way or cannot be implemented at all. Like we...