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

Developing an idea into an experience


The main reason for creating a new game mechanic can be described as the need to give the player a novel experience. We learned how the game vision gives us designers a clear direction to follow in order to develop our games. By visualizing the experience we want our players to have, we are taking the first step into the conceptualization of a new game mechanic.

Let's see a practical example.

Modern First Person Shooter (FPS) games are very different from what we used to play in the 80s and the 90s. When we immersed ourselves in a frenetic shooting game all we needed were some interesting enemies, a few different weapons, and just a bunch of basic controls, such as move and shoot.

In a quest for better immersion, game designers started to ask questions like: "How can we make an FPS more realistic?", "How can we make shooting more tactical?", and "How can we give players the impression that they are in the middle of a real shooting scenario?"

A real gunfight...