I ordered this book a while ago and it arrived in the mail last tuesday. It’s not a technical book but, as the title says, about game design. The book covers three main topics: design theory, design process and design production.
The design theory chapter is for the most part an overview of game genres, both currently popular ones (first person shooter, strategy, …) and genres that are less popular these days in the mainstream commercial game world but still have a large following in the indie scene (platform, scrolling shooters, …). An in-depth look is taken at two hot issues: 2D versus 3D and single player versus multiplayer. Next, the design process is covered. This chapter starts with game and character concepts, inspiration and brainstorming. After that, it moves on to level design, game physics and 3D modeling techniques. The final chapter, design production, offers an overview of the entire game development process and some ideas to publish your game.
The book contains lots of images and examples from well-known games, wich makes it easy to read and understand. Most of the concepts and ideas are explained with examples. Overall, I highly recommend it to all game developers, both beginning and experienced ones.

I ordered this book a week ago and a few days ago it arrived in the mail. It had heard about it a lot and read some very positive reviews about it, and many developers mentioned it on forums. Seems like it’s a very popular book. After flipping through it a bit and reading a few chapter, I can say this is justified!
So the book is about indie (or independent) game development. What exactly is this. Being “indie” means you aren’t financially tied to a publisher or investor. You don’t owe anyone money and you have complete creative freedom. This means independent games are usually low-budget games (not all of them, id software is independent but by no means low budget), but that doesn’t mean low-quality. Some indie games look incredibly impressive. The book starts out with an introduction about the indie game development scene.
The next topic is game design. A very important issue here is knowing your limitations and proper planning. Indie game developers probably won’t develop a cutting edge 3D engine or build a next-gen MMORPG, that’s something you’ll have to accept. When I first started thinking about developing games I actually thought I could do everything on my own: write a game engine, design graphics, write all tools and even compose music (what the hell was I thinking?). It took a while before I figured out that simply wasn’t realistic, so if you are like me and think you can do this all on your own, think again. Get a decent, working game engine and use that to develop games. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel!
Another issue is funding. Developing games costs money, even if you do it for a hobby. Computers and software cost money, a game engine costs money, and good graphics and sound effects usually aren’t free either. Most indie developers also have a day job, wich should be enough to fund their projects (it works fine for me), but sometimes it’s not enough, or people decide to quit their day job and become full time game developers. I myself wouldn’t even dream of that! The book contains a chapter on “creative funding”, wich deals with this sort of things. To my surprise, it also mentioned investors money. This goes against the entire idea of independence. After all, investors are part owner of your project and get to decide about it, limiting your creative freedom, wich is what indie game development is all about. In my humble opinion, investors is something to avoid like the plague!
And then there’s the development team. Building a game development team is not an easy task, and neither is managing one. It becomes especially difficult when you never meet each other in person and have to manage everything online. For now I don’t have to worry about that since I work on my own (the so-called lone wolf developer), but who knows what the future brings? Anyway, the entire process of recruiting, compensation, management and leadership is discussed.
The main focus, of course, is building the game. After all, that’s what game developers do. Like I said before, you can’t do everything on your own (And if you think you can, slam your head into the wall and say to yourself: “I am not John Carmack and I can’t write a cutting edge 3D engine”. Unless you really are John Carmack, of course). Good use of third party tools is essential. Other important elements of the building process are writing documentation, something that’s often forgotten until the last moment (that reminds me, I should get started on the game manual for Wasabi Defense) and project testing. Another thing you shouldn’t neglect is finishing the game. New ideas and features will probably keep on coming, but at a certain point you should say “Enough is enough”. You really don’t want a game that’s in beta for a decade.
And finally: publishing. There are lots of options for this. I have published only one finished game so far, so I don’t have a lot of experience in that area. You can handle everything yourself, wich can be a bit intimidating, or you can use a third party publisher, wich is what most developers will go for. There are lots of game portals that will take care of publishing, marketing and payment processing, and my advice is: use them! Every minute you don’t have to spend worrying about this is another minute you can spend developing games.
My final conclusion? This isn’t really a book about the technical side of game development, but more about the entire process from concept to finished game. I think this book belongs on the bookshelf of every game developer, even if you work entirely on your own. Project management and proper planning are essential for everybody, wether you work alone or in a team.

Artificial intelligence. One of the most complicated aspects of game development, and one of the things that can ruin an otherwise excellent game. Nothing ruins a game like shooting a guard with a sniper rifle while the guy who is standing next to him acts as of nothing happened. Although I probably won’t be writing that kind of games any time soon, I decided to start studying AI a bit and I got this book to get started.
The book starts with a short introduction on writing Windows applications, wich is always useful. The programming language used throughout the book is C++, and the demos on the included cd rom are meant for Microsoft Visual C++. Since Microsoft now has Visual Studio Express, a free version of their development tool, this shouldn’t be a problem. Also, the book contains instructions on how to convert the source code and project files for other programming tools.
The two techniques the book focuses on are genetic algoritms and neural networks. A genetic algoritm mimics the process of natural selection and evolution to find a solution to a problem. Some typical applications of this method are pathfinding and solving the so-called “traveling salesman problem”. Neural networks mimic the way the brain works. These structures are often used for all sorts of pattern recognition (speech and handwriting recognition, mouse gestures, …) and are used a lot in games. A unique property of neural networks is that they can be self-learning.
The book explains the AI techniques with some demo applications that are included on a cd rom. The code is explained very extensively and anyone with even just some basic knowledge of C++ should not have any problems understanding it. It’s very easy to change the parameters of the algoritms so you can experiment a lot with them, and everything is very well documented. And even though AI is a though subject and it will take you a lot of time to master it, this is an excellent book to get started.

I have added two more templates to my design document template package. I have created a layer organiser and a new version of the source code tracker. In the first version (wich is still included, of course) there was a section for dependencies (files that are imported in the current source file). The new version doesn’t have this section so there’s more place for entering the classes that are in the file. You can get the new version on the Tools page.

Even though I make sprite based games, I still need a 3D modelling tool. A very common way to create great looking sprites is pre-rendering them. Instead of using a 3D model, you render a bitmap of it and use that as a sprite. A while ago I already reviewed POV-Ray and Moray. While these are great tools, they have their downsides. A very well known application in the open source community is Blender 3D. This tool is claimed to have the same capabilities as some that cost thousands of dollars!
So let’s take a look at Blender. The first thing you will notice when starting it is the complicated interface. While this has improved a lot, it still looks very confusing to new users. The good news is that you don’t need most of the tools right away. Also, as we will see, there’s a truly gigantic amount of documentation available. You’ll need to digg through a lot of it since the program relies very heavily on keyboard shortcuts and the interface can be quite non-intuitive at times.

Blender has the same basic capabilities as all other 3D modelling tools: creating, editing and deforming meshes, working with bezier curves and splines, texturing, creating materials, lighting, UV-mapping, animation, … It can import almost any type of 3D file, including 3DS, the file type used by 3D Studio. Since this is the most common file type you’ll encounter when searching online for 3D models, this is a great advantage. Importing 3D models works perfectly.
What’s truly amazing, though, is the scripting option. I haven’t used this yet (I’m only getting started with Blender), but it is even possible to create complete 3D games with it! I don’t know if there are a lot of people using this feature (I don’t really think so), but it’s impressive nonetheless. The scripting - wich is done in Python - also allows you to extend the functionality of Blender and add all sorts of new tools.
Of course, Blender can also do animation. You can use keyframes, motion curves and write your own animation scripts. A lot of Python scripts to help you create smooth animations are included. Perhaps one of the most useful is Walk-o-Matic, a script to create walk cycle animations, something that has a reputation of being quite difficult to do properly.
My overall opinion about this application is that even though it looks challenging at first, it is definitely worth trying out. The features and capabilities are simply incredible, especially for a free program. It can import almost every known 3D file format, and even if you encounter one that’s not supported there will probably be a script that does the job. And while the unconventional interface and heavy reliance on keyboard shortcuts seems intimidating, there’s lots and lots of documentation available to make it all easier.

Other reviews:

• Linux.com review
• ATPM review
• Bobulous.org review

Tutorials:

• Devmag tutorials (starting in issue #5)
• Blender 3D: noob to pro
• BlenderCourse (in English, Dutch and Czech)