Beginning Illustration and Storyboarding for Games is a bit of an odd duck. In some places, it's a design tutorial with instructions on how to design and flowchart story-style games. In some places it's an art book, with instructions on sketching and perspective and what kind of pencil hardness and paper texture you should use for roughing out your visual designs. And in some places it's a book on visual design with suggestions on how to lay out your visuals so that they'll be properly balanced and aesthetically pleasing.

In other words, Beginning Illustration and Storyboarding for Games isn't quite certain what kind of book it's supposed to be. If you're putting together a detailed design document and you want your sketched screen mockups to be something more robust than stick figures, then this book will probably help you out. Otherwise, it's a bit too schizophrenic to cover any of its topics in depth over its 275-page length.

Some parts of the book just puzzled me. Early on in the book, for example, the author spends several pages showing a rough "boxes and arrows" layout for a story-based game called Flood. The first step the author takes in creating this game layout is to make a page in a paint program complete with watery textured background for the page to match the game's name. Then he makes some cool bubble-framed boxes for the actual states. And THEN finally he gets around to actually putting together the game's states and connecting 'em with arrows. Call me a luddite, but my thinking while reading the whole process was "boy is this ever style over substance". You'd be much better served hashing out your layout with a pad of sticky-notes and a marker-board. I can understand the need for a really pretty layout in a design document that needs to be shown to a potential publisher, but just to sketch out your initial design?

I was immediately reminded of the scene in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy when the marketing team that was trying to colonize ancient Earth could not invent the wheel until the market researchers determined what color it should be.

The rest of the book reads more like a pencil-art and design tutorial than a game design handbook. There are plenty of handy tips on putting together templates for a storyboard and how a storyboard for a game differs from that for a movie. The art-tips are pretty tool-agnostic, so it's not a tutorial for any kind of drawing software. You could implement the author's techniques using any draw/paint application you could find.

The final chapters show you how to come up with a cool cover for your design document (no really) and how to sketch out a design for a 3D game using Maya. The pack-in CD includes electronic versions of much of the art in the book.

What's the audience for Beginning Illustration and Storyboarding for Games? To be honest, I'm not sure. It's not much of a design handbook, with only a couple of chapters devoted strictly to design and suffering from the aforementioned "style over substance" problem. It's a fairly good book on how to sketch out game-screens quickly and how to work a storyboard into a design-document, but I'm not sure how much that skill is worth. You might be better served buying a book on game design and a book on visual design. It's true that this book covers both topics, but not to very much depth.