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

Summary


We have taken a peek at how a narrative is designed for video games and how stories suit the video game medium very well. Of course, this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Interactive storytelling is a huge discipline, one that a game designer should know but not necessarily need to master unless he wants to specialize in writing or narrative design. For the reader who wants to delve deeper into it, we have established a few starting points.

We looked at two common types of narrative: the three-act story, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end, through which the tension constantly builds up and reaches a final climax, and the monomyth, which is used to represent the archetypal hero's journey through an adventure that takes him out of his comfort zone into a new world of discovery and experiences, and back again.

We went through the structure of different narratives in games, both linear and modular, and underlined the similarity between narrative and the game structure we...