There are currently a few days left in the Humble Book Bundle on Game Design and AI. I spent my Saturday skimming and reading through most of these books and here are my thoughts on the bundle and some of the books in it:
Tier 1
At the $1 USD level, you get Game AI Pro and Games As A Service. I didn’t read Games As A Service and have no current desire to do so. The Game AI Pro book is a very 581 page text book that should serve as an encyclopedia or reference manual for anyone wishing to become a professional AAA Gameplay Programmer or Game Engine programmer. It is filled with real-world examples and case studies from AAA and independent games, often written by the developers. It is filled with helpful diagrams, pseudo-code, python scripts, LUA scripts and C++ code. Honestly, if you fully understand all the concepts in these pages, you are probably in the top 1% of all game dev programmers. For tech designers and even script designers, the general concepts may be very useful to be familiar with, but the technical details within these pages are probably overkill. For more detail about the Game AI Pro book series, please see Tier 3.
Tier 2
At the $10 USD level, you get 3 more books in the Game AI Pro series, and 4 books for game designers.
- Craft and Science of Game Design – this is a book about the actual job aspects of being a game designer rather than design theory or technique. I think this may be a very helpful book for people early in their careers in the game development industry. It serves like a survival guide or handbook to being a professional game designer. One chapter covers the different specializations of game designer such as tech designer, story/narrative designer, system designer, level designer, quest designer, balance designer, etc. Each specialty is only given a paragraph, so you just get a summary of what each specialty does without going into detail. The book then focuses a chapter each on leadership skills and then specific communication skills relevant to game design. There are a lot of practical tips as well as descriptions of some of the daily tasks a game designer will be doing like stand-up meetings, design documents, email updates, etc.
- “Making Deep Games: Designing Games with Meaning and Purpose” is the other book in this bundle that I think is very good for game designers. It is covers the author’s game design theories for “creating games about the whole spectrum of the human experience”. This is a 228 page text book that probably mirrors the author’s college course of the same name. There are exercises at the end of each chapter that are intended for classroom settings as well as a list of references for each chapter. It uses a number of AAA and indie games as case studies. Some of the games discussed or referenced include God of War II, The Marriage, Gone Home and Silent Hill 2.
- “We Deserve Better Villains” is another book about the practical and technical aspects of being a game designer from start to finish of a AAA game development cycle. Each part of the game dev cycle is divided up into chapters in chronological order from preparation, blue sky and preproduction to post-release and live service. Each chapter and subsection starts with an analogy of the game designers role and responsibilities in that part of the game dev cycle to playing a game (mostly fantasy RPG). Most of the book is actually from the perspective of this fantasy RPG analogy. Each subsection then ends with a short section titled “Steps to Success” that gives suggested activities or exercises (both related and unrelated to game design/game development) that the author thinks will help you in that part of the dev cycle. I am not a game designer, but I found this information helpful and applicable to my own roles as a programmer and sometime project lead. The author uses a humorous writing style to try to keep the information entertaining. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand many of the humor or jokes. I also didn’t fully understand many of the comparisons between the game development cycle and playing an RPG. I also strongly disagree with the idea that game designers and other game developers should accept long work hours and crunch-culture as a necessary part of the AAA game industry. These things made this book difficult for me to read, which is a shame since there are some good points about self-care, how to interact with other game dev disciplines, doing interviews for media, being a leader, etc.
- The Pyramid of Game Design – the title evokes multi-level marketing scheme and the topic of the book is not far off from that: it covers design issues related to operating “service” games. By page 3, I already had a very bad opinion of the book – it had already praised the monetary success of “innovations” from EA, FIFA and Free-2-Play games. Out of curiosity, I searched for the word “whale” and found a featured section dedicated to trying to eliminate the use of the phrase “whale hunting” and instead replace it with “nurturing superfans”. They made arguments of this will help developers to better respect and humanize their customer base. Given that one page before that section, it talks about maximizing the amount of money that superfans spend on their games, I am not convinced. I stopped trying to skim or read anything else in this book.
Tier 3
- Game Engine Gems 2 and 3 – these books are very dense books that serve as curated anthologies from the most useful scientific and industry papers related to game engine programming. There are 3-4 parts in each book. The first part of each book covers Game Engine Rendering and 3D graphics. The other parts cover physics, AI, and other general aspects of game engine design and programming. None of this is beginner friendly, but if your goal is to become a game engine programmer at a AAA game studio or work as a senior game engine programmer for Unreal and Unity game engines, these are topics you may want to know.
- Game AI Pro 360: these are like equivalent of the Gems series books for Game AI. Things covered in these books include optimized pathfinding algorithms that may be 100x faster than A*, pathfinding algorithms that incorporate combat strategies like cover, stealth, line-of-sight; Enemy behaviors, companion behaviors, etc. These are almost all industry papers with practical examples from real world AAA games. Want to know how Ellie’s companion AI including following, pathfinding, cover-finding, combat decisions, etc. were implemented and optimized? It’s here. Real production script examples, pseudo-code, diagrams, data tables are included with all articles that I read through.
The following books are helpful for people that did not have the opportunity to be exposed to the vast variety of video games that have been published over the past 40+ years. For younger people, many of the older games covered here are no longer available or difficult to obtain. Even for people that did play some of these games when they were released, most people were probably not playing them with a game designer’s mindset. My only complaint is that there is no coverage of survival horror games or their historical, social and game design significance.
- 20 Essential Games To Study – this is not a book focused on technical aspects of game design. It’s written by Josh Brycer, a game design critic, and serves as a book version of a top 20 games youtube video. The author discusses what they liked about each game’s design, but in my opinion, it’s more of a reviewer’s commentary rather than an analysis of the game design. The games are ordered in chronological order from Star Control 2 (1992) to Doom (2016).
- Game Design Deep Dive: Platformers – another book written by Josh Brycer. By focusing on one game genre, this author is able to make more detailed and insightful game design observations than their previous book above. There is still a good amount of historical commentary sprinkled between sections about the different types of platformer mechanics from different jumping styles to level design, puzzles, etc. If the last book was the equivalent of a top 20 list, this is the equivalent of a long-form video essay.
- Vintage Games 2.0 – this is a big review of 50 influential games over the history of computing starting with mainframe games like SpaceWar! to games of the late 2000s like Minecraft. This book is over 300 pages and each game is covered in detail with a historical retrospective, game commentary and multiple screenshots and related photographs. The stand-out feature for me is that each game chapter ends with a “Playing <the game> Today”. It includes links to websites, emulators, etc.