the game maker's apprentice: game development for beginners

ISBN-13: 9781590596159 / Angielski / Miękka / 2006 / 314 str.

Jacob Habgood; Mark Overmars

Opis

Way back when Mario was still a mere twinkling in Miyamoto's eye, I was the proud owner of a state-of-the-art Commodore 64 microcomputer. It came with a game development s- tem called "The Quill," which allowed anyone to create their own text-based adventure games. It may have been incredibly crude, but it suddenly put at my fingertips the thrill of enterta- ing my nearest and dearest by devising "interactive challenges" of my own. Unfortunately, I knew little about game design, and rather than easing my players into a new and alien world, I treated them as opponents that had to be defeated before they could reach the end. Their sp- its crushed, they left, never to return . . . It took me years of playing a variety of good (and bad) games to eventually learn how to treat the player to the game-playing experience that their investment of time and money deserved. It took just hours of reading this book to wish I'd had its invaluable guidelines and the accompanying Game Maker tool to help me take my own first steps into game devel- ment all those years ago.

Recenzje

From the reviews:

"The desire to create computer games attracts many young people to computing. This book meets the needs of this group of readers and students very well. It is also a fine introduction to the making of computer games for the experienced software developer who always wondered how games were made. ... There are excellent software development lessons that can be learned using this book ... . the book provides a superb introduction to programming as well as to game construction." (Anthony J. Duben, ACM Computing Reviews, Vol. 49 (5), May, 2008)

Spis treści

Getting Started.- Welcome to Game Maker.- Your First Game: Devilishly Easy.- Action Games.- More Actions: A Galaxy of Possibilities.- Target the Player: It’s Fun Being Squished.- Game Design: Interactive Challenges.- Level Design.- Inheriting Events: Mother of Pearl.- Maze Games: More Cute Things in Peril.- Game Design: Levels and Features.- Multiplayer Games.- Cooperative Games: Flying Planes.- Competitive Games: Playing Fair with Tanks.- Game Design: Balance in Multiplayer Games.- Enemies and Intelligence.- GML: Become a Programmer.- Clever Computers: Playing Tic-Tac-Toe.- Intelligent Behavior: Animating the Dead.- Final Words.  

O autorze

Jacob Habgood worked in the U.K. games industry for seven years, writing console games for Gremlin Interactive and Infogrames/Atari. During this time, he contributed to a wide range of titles and lead the programming teams on MicroMachines (PS2, X-Box and Game Cube) and Hogs of War (PlayStation). Jacob is now a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham, researching the educational potential of computer games. As part of this research, Jacob runs clubs and workshops teaching children and teenagers how to make their own computer games, providing free activities and resources through his website: www.gamelearning.net.