Books On Game Design

Game Design
Game Maker is a great tool for creating your own games. But before you can create them you must design them. You can of course try to copy existing games but it is much more fun to design your own games. This page provides you with some resources about game design.

An introduction
To get you started you can download my introductory tutorial on game design. This will give you some first ideas.

Books
There are a huge number of books around about game design. Unfortunately, most of them are of rather poor quality. Here are some that I can recommend. Clicking on the link will bring you to the amazon.com page where you can order them.

Jacob Habgood, Mark Overmars, The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners, Apress, 2006, ISBN 1590596153. Our own book on Game Maker will contain a number of chapters on game design aspects, focussing on their use in Game Maker. You can find more information about our book on the book page. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590596153?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

Nanu Swamy and Naveena Swamy, Basic Game Design & Creation for Fun and Learning, Charles River Media, 2006, ISBN 1-58450-446-3. This is the first English language book on game design that uses Game Maker as the programming tool. It is directed towards the absolute beginner and shows you how to create a number of easy games. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584504463?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

Andrew Rollings, Ernest Adams, On Game Design, New Riders Publishing, 2003, ISBN 1-5927-3001-9. This book deals with the many different aspects of designing computer games. It in particular focusses on what is required for a commercially successful computer game. It first treats some general topics like game concepts, stroytelling, user interaction, and balancing. Next it treats eight different types of games, focussing on the important issues in each of them. The book is easy to read. It does not go very deep in the material and is sometimes a bit too positive, while you could learn a lot from other peoples mistakes. But is is still a useful book to read. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592730019?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play, Game Design Fundamentals, The MIT Press, 2004, ISBN 0-262-24045-9. A clearly academic book about game design. The book goes in great lengths to define what a game is, what game rules are, what game play is, and what is the role of culter in games. The book is about games in general, not just computer games. Definitely not easy material and sometimes really slow going, but a must-read for people that take game design serious. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262240459?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

Chris Crawford, On Game Design, New Riders Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-13-146099-4. This is a special book by a special person. Chris Crawford has been involved in game design over the past 25 years. In this book he tells his experience and his view on game design. The book is written in a rather arrogant and shocking style. But the points he raises are important issues that set you thinking. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131460994?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

Andrew Rollings, Dave Morris, Game Architecture and Design, New Riders Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-73571363-4. This is a very interesting book. It deals with three topics: How to design a good game with good game play, how to organize a company to create games, and how to organize the game software. The first two parts are the most interesting. The third part is sort of standard software engineering. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735713634?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design. This book is a classic. It is long out of print. An electronic version can be found here: http://www.mindsim.com/MindSim/Corporate/artCGD.pdf.

Andrew Glassner, Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction, A K Peters, Ltd., 2004, ISBN: 1-56881-221-3. An interesting book on storytelling from the perspective of the use in games. Very useful if you want to create interesting storylines in your games. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568812213?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters, Why Children need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, Basic Books, 2002, ISBN 046503696-1. A book about violence in entertainment media and computer games. The book tries to explain why children like or need violence. It clearly shows were studies that relate violent games to aggression fail. A very good book to read, in particular when you are a teacher or a parent or play or create violent games yourself. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465036953?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

David Kushner, Masters of Doom, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004, ISBN 0812972155. A book about the creation of Doom, a game which meant the start of a new generation of computer games. Interesting read about the people who in some sense created the FPS genre. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812972155?tag2=gamemakerpage-20

Studying Game Design
At many colleges and universities you can nowadays study game design and technology. Unfortunately the curricula are very different and some of them are of rather poor quality. We recommend you to carefully investigate before you choose an institute. In the Netherlands there are in particular a number of curricula offered at Utrecht University, at the Utrecht School of the Arts, and at the Hogeschool Utrecht. These institute recently formed the Utrecht Platform for Game Education And Research (UPGEAR)(http://www.upgear.nl/). For more information see the game education page.(http://www.gamemaker.nl/studying.html)

Some Useful Links
Here are some useful links about game design:

Game Design Course

(http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/gds/) - The course on game design I teach at Utrecht University.

Game developers network

(http://www.gamedev.net/)

Game development search engine

(http://www.gdse.com/)

Gamasutra

(http://www.gamasutra.com/)

Ambrosine's game pages (http://www.ambrosine.com/)

Games-Net, in German

(http://www.games-net.de/)

Site devoted to Game A.I.

(http://www.gameai.com/)

International Game Developers Association

(http://www.igda.org/)

Game Programming University

(http://www.gameuniv.net/) - Offers an online curriculum on game programming.