Your Favorite Books

Without saying anything to sway your opinions, what are your favorite books regarding game making? Not only limited to Unity but just game making in general, so the entire process from design to development, programming, art, marketing, etc. Would love to hear your thoughts.

 

A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster, should be compulsory reading for hobby level game creators upward.

An Architectural Approach to Level Design, Christopher Totten, is also brilliant. Nice little preview here.

 

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
Game Programming Patterns
Design Patterns

 

I agree with a number of the titles above.

I recently finished "The Pragmatic Programmer, From Journeyman To Master" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas and found it quite interesting. It is not directly about game development, focusing instead on general project programming.

 

Was actually just thinking earlier of posting about a book I just got last night:

"Spelunky", by Derek Yu (published by Boss Fight Books). I'm about half way through (it's not super long) and it's really good. Great insight and inspiration from a solo-developer standpoint.

Besides that one, as far as straight up game development related, I have several favorites, including:

• "Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture"
• "Designing Virtual Worlds"

I read a lot, and some books have truly inspired me over the years to keep moving forward with my business and goals (not just in game development). Here are a few of them from my bookshelf:

• "Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way"
• "Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable"
• "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be: The world's best selling book"
• "F'D Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts"

Hope that helps.

 

I was thinking about this again today. Without wishing to be too tangential or derail the thread, a great deal of the thematic and aesthetic influence in my current personal project has been derived from fiction- particularly fiction which can be read very visually. To name a few:

The Flambeur Trilogy, Hannu Rajaniemi
The Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Gormenghast Trilogy, Melvyn Peake
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Also good from both a personal development perspective, and understanding how players might respond to your game, is Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman.

 

Awesome, thanks for that one. I've added it to my to-read list.

 

i think theory of fun should help me a bit, thanks!
ive been having a real problem thinking my concepts are fun, even when iam sure others would,
im kinda burnt out of gaming in general ... then again, not really, but yeah sorta,
alot of the concepts that come to me just seem lame and boring...
.. but theres waaay "lamer" games (to me) making bank... lol

 

Thoughts on 3 game design books that I've read lately:

• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses - Completely inspiring and with very practical application to your game in development. They sell an actual deck of cards too, that are based on the "lenses" in the book (ways to evaluate your game).
• A Theory of Fun - A fun read that talks about games as learning and from various perspectives in a very conversational tone. Every other page is a cartoon; a little lighter than I was expecting. Not as useful to me as the previous book, but still worth a read.
• Rules of Play - An absolute tome that I use to prop up my laptop. Very academic and overly technical, with the feeling of a school textbook. Still trying to get through this..very dry and not finding too much of practical use. Worth taking a look at though if you want to get heavy into writing about game theory, or you have some time on your hands.

I need to pick up that programming patterns book.

 

On a slightly different note both

Game Coding Complete
and
Game Engine Architecture

are great books with more of a focus on engine design. Still highly useful for Unity dev though as you can see why certain systems are designed how they are and how they likely work beneath the hood.

Will also second Game Programming Patterns

 

One of my favorite books that will help you market your game is Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk. Its about marketing in general but all applies to game development.