Creating Games
Mechanics, Content, and Technology

Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology by Morgan McGuire, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins
Price: $69.00
Availability: In stock.

Summary

Creating Games offers a comprehensive overview of the technology, content, and mechanics of game design. It emphasizes the broad view of a games team and teaches you enough about your teammates’ areas so that you can work effectively with them. The authors have included many worksheets and exercises to help get your small indie team off the ground.

Special features:

Exercises at the end of each chapter combine comprehension tests with problems that help the reader interact with the material

Worksheet exercises provide creative activities to help project teams generate new ideas and then structure them in a modified version of the format of a game industry design document

Pointers to the best resources for digging deeper into each specialized area of game development

Website with worksheets, figures from the book, and teacher materials including study guides, lecture presentations, syllabi, supplemental exercises, and assessment materials

Details

ISBN: 978-1-56881-305-9
Year: 2008
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 500
Web Site:
http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/creatinggames/

Reviews

Andrew Glassner, SIAM (External Link)

January 2010

The writing is friendly and just casual enough that the authors’ personalities come through. The book is engaging, clear, and well focused. The text combines a general survey of each topic with occasional asides offering specific and well-chosen detail. This combination gives the book a sense of confident authority… .This ambitious, wide-ranging book succeeds in giving its readers a broad overview of many topics that contribute to contemporary video game design. For someone who has never worked in the field, this book will give a general understanding of how a game is designed, the working of a modern studio, the roles of different departments and the people in them, the tools they use, and the technical issues that are important to them. The exercises at the end of each chapter enhance the book’s value as a course textbook.
With its wealth of information on many subjects important to game design, the book would serve well as an introductory text for a student considering a career as a game designer.

Infinite Connection: What Matters (External Link)

April 2009

Apply Game Design as a Science for Public Policy to Rescue Economy, Planet: “They are all subject to analysis as games: scenarios where intelligent agents (players) seek to maximize their payoff (win) under a set of rules. Although some seem like fun and others like work, an understanding of each instance informs the others, and insights for any improve how we both work and play.”

Serious Fun: Storytelling and Strategy (External Link)

November 2008

“Williams College Professor Morgan McGuire takes his games very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he has written a book about it. … While teaching his game design class, McGuire couldn’t find a book that covered this, so he called up his colleague Professor Chad Jenkins at Brown, and they co-wrote the book to help other people design games. It combines scientific theories about rule systems with more practical advice about the process of designing a game.”

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