Game Design: Art and Business of Creating Games by Bob Bates
Published April 2001
List Price: $29.99, Your Amazon.com Price: $22.79
Course Technology PTR Price: $23.99
Average rating:
Amazon Sales Rank: 273,808
Summary Covers everything from how to get a foot in the door to what to do once inside, how to license a game, how to settle contract issues, and how to demonstrate the game to prospective companies.
Great Book, helped a ton. I love the entire series and I hope they continue to make more. Very easy to read and not once did I find myself getting bored!
I am a High School student, and recently I have become very interested in the Gaming Industry. I tried several months, emailing experts, posting messages in forums, but never really got my answers answered. So I decided to purchase a book. Game Design: The Art & Business of Creating Games is written in a lot of detail and covers a lot of aspects in so little space. It gave me a better perspective and answered most of my questions. However, parts of the book emphasize on topics I would not have included in such a book. But overall it was pretty interesting.
This particular book is very well rounded and reads very easily. I was very impressed wuth the overall professionalism that was applied to this book.
One thing that jumped out at me, though. I have a couple of articles from this site and others that seemed particularly good. I found one of those articles included in one of the chapters! That was a wonderful find.
The one thing I would have liked more of though, would have been some more about hero development - like the Hero's Journey stuff.
I found that after reading another book, "Game Architecture and Design"
by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris, this book was not only smaller (and so less info) but also different.
The primary difference is that even though there seems to be less info, the info that is provided is specific and concise. For instance, a whole chapter is dedicated to different genres and how to go about designing them. This info was good for novices but, at the same time, the chapter maybe should have been broken up into separate books by itself.
The later chapters start dealing with some interesting things, such as developing your own IP, licensing issues, the development team breakdowns, and how a game gets sold.
The development team was dealt with in more detail in "Game Architecture and Design", but I found that this book provided a concise second opinion. Taking notes from both books would probably be a good idea.
Provides a great overview for each of the game design common issues. Good summary for all the game deign process.
Although I think this book is best suited for 'novice' designers
I am an experienced business programmer and game PLAYER who had decided to start delving into that ever-increasing pile of "pet projects" I always wanted to do. When I decided I wanted to try my hand at independent game development, I wanted an overview of how the biz worked, who the primary players were, and what sort of mindset I needed to take. This book helped lay all of that out a bit better for me. It has fantastic descriptions of the various roles in game development and production as well as the general path that needs to be taken to get published, etc. There are also sizeable sections on things to consider when designing games of various genres. It's not a technical book at all, but rather an overview that helps you understand the business and mindset of the entertainment development world.
A quick and often amusing read! Well worth it for someone looking to break in to the market!
I was the technical editor for this book. I liked it a lot. Bob's pretty cool, and his industry experience really shows through in the book. I have it right next to me on my bookshelf (its a small bookshelf, so only the really good books get to go there).
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