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

Level design and storytelling


As you may remember from the previous chapters, games are a medium for interaction and storytelling. When creating new playable content, you have a variety of tools and opportunities to tell your stories. As we have seen, these stories can emerge from both the overarching narrative and the gameplay experience.

Sometimes both stories will be tightly connected. In the detective game L.A Noire, most gameplay actions (such as gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses and so on) are not only motivated and supported by the narrative but also crucial for its development:

In other cases, gameplay and narrative can be independent entities. In Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, the orb-matching puzzle gameplay could easily be swapped entirely without affecting the narrative; and on the flip side, the narrative itself does little to influence gameplay:

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords offers a strange (and yet fitting) marriage of match-3 puzzle gameplay with...