So…I feel like writing about books that I’ve been reading.
Warning list is 100% game/computer related.
One that I’ve nearly finished, ‘The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design’ by Flint Dille and John Zuur.
Well, honestly I would rate it, at best, as average. Good thing is that it was pretty cheap (≈11€).
You can separate the book into 2 parts, the one that you want to read – that is the one that talks about game writing and design – and the one that is there to fill the rest of the pages.
While in theory it was nice to include a bit about how the game industry works, first: no need to use half of the book, second: if you do get into the game industry, you will already know how it works, rarely (or never even) do they hire a game designer/writer that doesn’t have his/her name on some game credits.
A bit like politics, when you get there, it means you were already one of them for some time or else you’d never have a chance enter ‘the system’.
Normally this kind of book is aimed at indie game devs, this one – due to almost half of it being dedicated to how stuff works in the big(-ish) names of the industry – looks like it is aimed at the lucky bastard that descended with a parachute right in the middle of an AAA title. That’s the idea I get.
Now things I liked, they have practical examples about how to organize your game design ideas, and every few pages there’s a ‘go and do this’ exercise. And last but not least the ‘Backwater Game Design Document’, which is a complete – afaik – design document for a game – non-existent one, from what I know – but still a complete document to give you an idea of how one of these looks. Great if you’re thinking about becoming a ‘big name’ professional on the game industry.
Now if you are an $0 budget indie all you need as design document (to start with, at least) is: “You know *insert name of a game*? Kinda like that, but *little list of changes*.”
Other books:
‘Character Development and Storytelling for Games’ by Lee Sheldon — GOD, it’s boring…but it’s a good book in my opinion, it’s just that I’m not much of a writer.
‘Beginning C# 3.0: An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming’ by Jack Purdum — Looks like a pretty nice book for programming beginners, seems to cover all the basics pretty well. Reading it so I can use C# for scripting on Unity and so C# can replace Visual Basic in my ‘Programming languages I use’ list.
‘3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop’ by Luke Ahearn — Can’t really review this one, since I read it in ‘Speed reading’ mode, 3 hours reading it and got to the end. But overall it looked like a nice book, will re-read it calmly someday.
Other than computer related books, I rarely read, last non-technical books I read were ‘1984′ and ‘The Prose Edda’ and that was over 1 year ago.