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 8. Games and Stories

We have been discussing how to create a vision and communicate it to the team, and how to design game mechanics and prototype them to answer fundamental questions as soon as possible in the development process. We have learned how to distill what we call fun into an interactive experience. It is now time to look at how to take all these elements and make them part of a narrative that can take our players into a virtual world and awaken their imagination, immersing them in the kind of experience that only video games can offer.

Video games (just like books, movies, or plays) can tell stories. Stories are one of the most powerful things human beings can use to communicate. The power of the video game medium, though, lies in one extra thing other mediums rarely have: the enormous potential of interactivity. There's more: this potential is far from being fully known, understood, and accepted at large.

Consider that literature and written stories have been around for...