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 level design?


Level design is the process of creating playable content that serves as a medium of delivering gameplay and storytelling experiences to players. Some games rely on carefully crafted and strictly planned levels/maps/stages/missions. Others leave room for randomization, but still require human input to create puzzles, challenges, enemy spawn rules, pre-assembled level chunks, and even high-level world-building rules.

The craft of level design lives on a flexible cross-section between game design, storytelling, and art. Depending on the needs of the project and team structure, a level designer will either take care of the entire level design from start to finish or ask for artistic input from environmental artists, who'll take care of the visual side of things for them. In smaller teams, it's quite common to have a generalist game designer tackle level design tasks.

Depending on the game you're working on, the tools you'll use to create levels and missions can vary greatly...