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Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition
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Author: Andrew Rollings, Dave Morris
List Price: $49.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0735713634
Publisher: New Riders (24 October, 2003)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 37,158
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
A good book if you want to go into the industry
Most of the game-writing books you find will cover a little bit of everything â?? some Windows programming, some C++ (or Java), some basic graphics knowledge, and a little bit about how to put it all together. My main complaints about those sorts of books is that much of it is not specific to games.This book covers a different set of topics. It isn't about the programming aspect, but about the entire development process. There are three sections: A. Game Design. As a non-professional game programmer, I found this section to be the most interesting. It covers things like game balance, skill levels, and making the parts of a game fit together nicely. B. Project Management. This section covers aspects of game development that hobbyists will find overkill, but that professionals will want to read. It includes both history and prescriptions for managing a project. Some of it seems to be excessively specific, like descriptions of exactly how teams "should" be structured, why you should not allow inflatable furniture at the office, and what signs you should look for to identify "problem" developers. C. Architecture. This section is a mix of stories about existing games and techniques to use when writing game code. It covers things like class hierarchies, state machines, game engines, design patterns, commenting style, whether you should use "goto", and other coding issues. The first section was great. I think most game developers (both hobbyist and professional) would find it interesting. I did not find the second section interesting, probably because I'm not involved in the industry. Parts of the third section were good, but at some point it descended into 40 pages addressing little things like the use of braces in C++ code, using goto, why you should comment your code, and so on. That's the kind of thing that's already covered by software engineering texts, and doesn't change just because you're writing games. Overall, I liked this book because it tackles the important issues in game development. However, I found that parts of it just weren't interesting, because I had read about those topics in books unrelated to game development.
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