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

Chapter 7. Prototyping

At this point in the book, you might have realized that, practical as it may be, game design happens in the designer's head first, on a document of some sort second, and only in a third step is it possible to implement it.

To actually make the game happen, the designer has to get their hands on a tool that allows them to create working software; to write some code. Not all game designers are programmers, and even if they know how to program, designing and programming are two different jobs both requiring a person's full attention (and the bigger the project, the more this truth cannot be bent).

There is one activity where a game designer is required to turn the design into a playable thing as if he was the only person working on it. This is the quintessence of practical game design.

This is the creation of a game prototype.