I want to learn how to make decent games (What books to buy?)

For christmas i want to buy alot of books (It can only be books, i dont want video tutorials)

Hey guys,i know i can watch tutorials but i really am just looking to buy 3-4 cheapish books to learn

What books should i buy for the following?

  1. Unity development (3d)

  2. Photoshop texturing (for games)

  3. Blender 3d modelling books (Or 3ds max, it doesnt matter)

  4. Animation Tips

Thanks guys, i want to learn to be an all round indie developer so thanks!

If you want to make “serious” games then you need to learn to program. You should consider either a scripting language such as python or a “serious” language such as C++, C# or Java. Any SAMs “teach yourself in 21 Days” would be a good start for whatever you choose to learn.

I’ve never used Unity, but I’ve heard around the camp fire you can make games without the need for any language. If that’s the case then maybe others here can offer advice.

For modelling 3D game characters, I found Antony Ward’s Game Character Development to be quite helpful. Although Antony recommends certain packages, you can use any modelling software you like. Being as the book is a bit old now(about 2008) Blender is most likely all you need. I personally use Silo and 3DCoat, but that’s for preference and low-specs respectively. Also, for basic low-poly topology techniques I recommend Glen Southern’s tutorials on Youtube.

For animation its The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams the animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Generally considered essential reading for any animator.

Texturing…hmmm. Sorry, I don’t know any books. Perhaps others can chime in on that one, too.

Hope that’s of some help. Good luck! :slight_smile:

If you want to learn unity, you probably will be better off by buying books for it first than programming in general. Check out Unity 4.x Cookbook and any other book that catches your attention http://www.gamefromscratch.com/page/Unity-Book-Roundup.aspx

EDIT: To mods, is this really the correct forum category? I don`t see anything about Blender Game Engine in the initial post.

Mind you that decent games are 99% artwork (models, sounds, ui, things like that) and 1% something else of which probably 0.1 is programming. You can actually make Doom3 in BGE - which would look pretty cool even by today standards - but noone does it because it takes professional skill to create the models, the environment, the sound effects that blend together in a credible way.
Reading about programming is a lot of fun. Well, not really reading but practicing is. But you won’t be closer to a decent game than you were before starting.

You can also make awesome digital paintings with Microsoft Paint but theres also software like Krita that does so much more. Imho the same can be said about BGE and any popular modern games engine. Why should I make games with BGE when theres Unity with its huge Asset Store that can help make games much, much faster - sometimes shrinking development time by months if not years.

See, the huge asset store. That’s the point.

Yes.

Game developers, whether that be with BGE or any other are most likely to be in this forum and most likely to have the best views on which books may be appropriate for game development

I know it isn’t on your list, but I’d recommend ‘a theory of fun’ and ‘game design: an art of lenzes’. They won’t teach you how to program, or to teach you how to make graphics, but they will give you a crash course in game design philosophies and’ll probably guide you when you’re stuck.

Maybe I am missing the point you are trying to make, but I find hard to agree with you that programming is “0.1%” of a game. Could you elaborate please?

Everyone here has some AMAZING input on how to pull off the technical execution of a game, but one thing that I haven’t seen a single person mention is how to make that technically well executed game actually good in the eyes of the player. You could program and model the best looking game in BGE, but if it isn’t well designed people will blow it off or forget about it pretty quickly. Games are an experience, and as a game designer/developer it’s your job to craft that experience. I would recommend watching practically every episode of a show on PennyArcade called Extra Credits (some episodes don’t talk about game design, but only around 3). On top of that there are tons of designers who go into their artistic process and explain how they crafted the experience that was their game and those are extremely helpful to read or watch. I have seen a ton of games made in BGE and Unity by small indie startups or small teams for fun and most of the time they don’t take things like design into account and their games ultimately fail, even if their execution of art or programming was solid.
EDIT: Sorry one guy above me posted a book about game design fundamentals, so there was single post about design :stuck_out_tongue: sorry

Think of Crysis 3. Beautifully complex game. Now let’s say that you have the rendering, animation, sound and physics engine prebuilt and readily avaiable. What is left, from a programming point of view, to make the game “run”?

Set properties, like speed, locations or conventional stuff like named numeric values.
Check distances to trigger events.
Add and remove objects.
Some timing.
Minor logical transitions like “if life is zero then you’re dead, go back to the welcome screen”.

It’s trivial stuff. Of course you have to learn to write even that code but it’s nothing like having to write the collision system or the partitioning structures for the world’s geometry: that would be a major pain but, sadly, we have it for free.
That’s the context in which I say that the coding portion is almost irrelevant.

The the multi-billion sector of sequel-makers called “game industry” could have something to say about that.

Besides the fundamental systems that game engines collect under a common API, there is still quite a lot to write for a succesful game. For some, this is AI routines; frameworks that suit the game. In fact, before I name other components of the programming world, AI is probably one of the biggest, (if not that itself) parts of a game. Most people do not use FSMs when designing a large scale AI system, because it doesn’t scale, so you’ll usually see two avenues of development, people investing lots of time in complex State Machine relationships and writing their documentation, or writing an implementation of a different behaviour tree/ graph system that is faster to use but requires the initial investment. I will not disagree that the content of the game is very important, and demands a lot of development time, but there are some points to be made here. Firstly, programming is content; it influences the mechanics of the game (which are a feature set of the game, thus content). In addition to this, most developers realise that in creating any game on the order of magnitude to that which we are accustomed to, it is a very tedious process to manually design individual assets for every level. Instead, clever instancing and modular development processes come into play, which too necessitate more programming.

There’s more to say (let’s not even consider networked games), but as a general rule of thumb, look at the games in the WIP forum. The best visual logic-brick-only games do significantly suffer from incomplete / oversimplified mechanics.

I strongly disagree. And let me punch my desk to stress it. “PAFF”.

When I spoke about games being overlooked for bad design I was speaking about indie games since I assume that’s what OP is, an indie developer. Also while triple a mainstream games might not be the best I have yet to play a COD game or an Assassin’s Creed that didn’t have fundamentally good design, and even if the game overall is lackluster, using basic good design techniques ropes in the vast majority of the audience because they don’t know anything better. As an indie developer you have to try twice as hard though as your franchise isn’t established and people really need to be wowed to buy into it. Often that’s not achievable through huge graphical tech demos like triple a games though, so you might have to try using the GAME part of games.

Chris Totten has a book Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity. He discusses texture painting too. It’s pretty good, although I haven’t finished it yet.

Good to see you’ve added animation to your list :wink:

What is left is the software engineering, development and maintenance of the framework that brings those separate engines together to form the game itself, not to mention the code required for the user interface and how it communicates and responds with the underlying program code.

The software development part of a game project is far from trivial, and certainly a lot more than 0.1% of a game. Sorry to disagree with you.