Principles of interface design; game world abstraction; avatar abstraction; game structures; genres; and the evolution of games. Annotation 2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
An easy-to-follow primer on the fundamentals of digital game design The quickly evolving mobile market is spurring digital game creation into the stratosphere, with revenue from games exceeding that of the film industry. With this guide to the basics, you'll get in on the game of digital game design while you learn the skills required for storyboarding, character creation, environment creation, level design, programming, and testing. Teaches basic skill sets in the context of current systems, genres, and game-play styles Demonstrates how to design for different sectors within gaming including console, PC, handheld, and mobile Explores low-poly modeling for game play Addresses character and prop animation, lighting and rendering, and environment design Discusses the path from concept to product, including pre- and post-production Includes real-world scenarios and interviews with key studio and industry professionals With Game Design Essentials, you'll benefit from a general-but-thorough overview of the core art and technology fundamentals of digital game design for the 21st century.
Your Hands-On Guide to Go, the Revolutionary New Language Designed for Concurrency, Multicore Hardware, and Programmer Convenience Today’s most exciting new programming language, Go, is designed from the ground up to help you easily leverage all the power of today’s multicore hardware. With this guide, pioneering Go programmer Mark Summerfield shows how to write code that takes full advantage of Go’s breakthrough features and idioms. Both a tutorial and a language reference, Programming in Go brings together all the knowledge you need to evaluate Go, think in Go, and write high-performance software with Go. Summerfield presents multiple idiom comparisons showing exactly how Go improves upon older languages, calling special attention to Go’s key innovations. Along the way, he explains everything from the absolute basics through Go’s lock-free channel-based concurrency and its flexible and unusual duck-typing type-safe approach to object-orientation. Throughout, Summerfield’s approach is thoroughly practical. Each chapter offers multiple live code examples designed to encourage experimentation and help you quickly develop mastery. Wherever possible, complete programs and packages are presented to provide realistic use cases, as well as exercises. Coverage includes Quickly getting and installing Go, and building and running Go programs Exploring Go’s syntax, features, and extensive standard library Programming Boolean values, expressions, and numeric types Creating, comparing, indexing, slicing, and formatting strings Understanding Go’s highly efficient built-in collection types: slices and maps Using Go as a procedural programming language Discovering Go’s unusual and flexible approach to object orientation Mastering Go’s unique, simple, and natural approach to fine-grained concurrency Reading and writing binary, text, JSON, and XML files Importing and using standard library packages, custom packages, and third-party packages Creating, documenting, unit testing, and benchmarking custom packages
The authors argue that women gamers, too often ignored as gamers, are in many respects leading the way in this trend towards design, cultural production, new learning communities, and the combination of technical proficiency with emotional and social intelligence.
Punk Playthings Provocations for 21st Century Game Makers "Punk was an attitude. It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that." Malcolm Mclaren Warning: If you want a silver bullet solution for efficient game making or a step-by-step guide to receiving Indie Game Dev hero worship, you’re in the wrong place. Put the book back on the shelf. Punk Playthings is an antidote to complacency and orthodoxy. Packed with probes and provocations that explore game making through fresh lenses for uncertain times, it challenges gaming monoculture by constructing a trading space for ideas and learning from across domains and cultures. Punk Playthings has zero respect for boundaries between mediums, industries, sectors, specialisms or disciplines. Instead, it challenges you to expand your cultural capital, think laterally and make new connections. Punk Playthings advocates a truly independent mindset and DIY approach for creating playful experiences with cultural resonance. It proclaims creative entrepreneurship as the true legacy of punk. Punk Playthings is not for everyone. But it might be for you.
An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance. Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.
To create a great video game, you must start with a solid game design: A well-designed game is easier to build, more entertaining, and has a better chance of succeeding in the marketplace. Here to teach you the essential skills of player-centric game design is one of the industry’s leading authorities, who offers a first-hand look into the process, from initial concept to final tuning. Now in its second edition, this updated classic reference by Ernest Adams offers a complete and practical approach to game design, and includes material on concept development, gameplay design, core mechanics, user interfaces, storytelling, and balancing. In an easy-to-follow approach, Adams analyzes the specific design challenges of all the major game genres and shows you how to apply the principles of game design to each one. You’ll learn how to: Define the challenges and actions at the heart of the gameplay. Write a high-concept document, a treatment, and a full design script. Understand the essentials of user interface design and how to define a game’s look and feel. Design for a variety of input mechanisms, including the Wii controller and multi-touch iPhone. Construct a game’s core mechanics and flow of resources (money, points, ammunition, and more). Develop appealing stories, game characters, and worlds that players will want to visit, including persistent worlds. Work on design problems with engaging end-of-chapter exercises, design worksheets, and case studies. Make your game accessible to broader audiences such as children, adult women, people with disabilities, and casual players. “Ernest Adams provides encyclopedic coverage of process and design issues for every aspect of game design, expressed as practical lessons that can be immediately applied to a design in-progress. He offers the best framework I’ve seen for thinking about the relationships between core mechanics, gameplay, and player—one that I’ve found useful for both teaching and research.” — Michael Mateas, University of California at Santa Cruz, co-creator of Façade
As computer games become more and more like Hollywood productions, the need for good story lines increases. Research shows that stories are highly valued by game players, so today's studios and developers need good writers. Creating narrative - a traditionally static form - for games is a major challenge. Games are at their heart dynamic, interactive systems, so they don't follow the guidelines and rules of film or T.V. writing. Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames addresses these issues and is the first book written to demystify this emerging field. Through the insights and experiences of practicing game writers, the book captures a snapshot of the narrative skills employed in today's game industry. This unique collection of practical articles provides the foundations to the craft of game writing. The articles, written by member of the International Game Developer's (IDGA) Game Writer's SIG, detail aspects of the process from the basics of narrative and non-linear narrative to writing comedy for games and creating compelling characters. Throughout the articles there is a strong emphasis on the skills developers and publishers will expect a game writer to have. The book is suitable for both beginners and experienced writers, and is a detailed guide to all the techniques of game writing. This book is an essential read for anyone wishing to get into this exciting field, particularly for new game writers wanting to hone their skills, and film and T.V. scriptwriters who want to learn how to transfer their skills to the games industry.