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Practical Game Design

Practical Game Design

By : Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci
5 (17)
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Practical Game Design

Practical Game Design

5 (17)
By: Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci

Overview of this book

If you’re in search of a cutting-edge actionable guide to game design, your quest ends here! Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of game design with expert guidance from veterans with decades of game design experience across a variety of genres and platforms. The second edition of this book remains dedicated to its original goal of helping you master the fundamentals of game design in a practical manner with the addition of some of the latest trends in game design and a whole lot of fresh, real-world examples from games of the current generation. This update brings a new chapter on games as a service, explaining the evolving role of the game designer and diving deeper into the design of games that are meant to be played forever. From conceptualizing a game idea, you’ll gradually move on to devising a design plan and adapting solutions from existing games, exploring the craft of producing original game mechanics, and eliminating anticipated design risks through testing. You’ll then be introduced to level design, interactive storytelling, user experience and accessibility. By the end of this game design book, you’ll have learned how to wrap up a game ahead of its release date, work through the challenges of designing free-to-play games and games as a service, and significantly improve their quality through iteration, playtesting, and polishing.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
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12
Chapter 12: Building a Great User Interface and User Experience

Gameplay balancing

The concept of gameplay balancing goes far beyond the qualities of individual objects and characters, and into the nature of play itself. Let’s take a look at a classic example of a game with a flawed design: tic-tac-toe. Why is it flawed? The starting player can never lose. All they need to do is put their mark in the middle. This is a failure of both the design of the rules and the game’s balance itself.

The game has a single, dominant strategy, and once you figure it out or run into it, you’re incentivized to replicate it. The presence of a dominant strategy drastically reduces a player’s options. Once introduced to the play pattern, it narrows down the possibility space and causes the game to lose most of its appeal. A wide possibility space is a defining feature of a well-balanced game, which, in turn, helps keep the game engaging for a long time.

“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.”...

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