Product Description

Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition is a revision of the classic that you have been waiting for! This is a detailed guide to game design and planning from first concept to the start of development, including case studies of well known games. Originally published in 1999, Game Architecture and Design, has been updated by the original authors Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris. They tap back into what they teach so well and update this classic with skills and techniques found in the industry today. With more than just re-usable code, it's a comprehensive study that deals specifically with the issues of game design, team building and management, and game architecture. Through the use of real-world experiences and case studies, Andrew and Dave share it all. They show you what's worked and why as well as what to avoid and how to fix any errors. This intelligent and well-argued book is a glimpse into the often-disordered world of game development. Readers will gain solid advice and know-how that can bring some order to the often-chaotic world found in game development.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #220856 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 960 pages

From the Back Cover

Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition is a revision of the classic that you have been waiting for! This is a detailed guide to game design and planning from first concept to the start of development, including case studies of well known games. Originally published in 1999, Game Architecture and Design, has been updated by the original authors Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris. They tap back into what they teach so well and update this classic with skills and techniques found in the industry today. With more than just re-usable code, it's a comprehensive study that deals specifically with the issues of game design, team building and management, and game architecture. Through the use of real-world experiences and case studies, Andrew and Dave share it all. They show you what's worked and why as well as what to avoid and how to fix any errors. This intelligent and well-argued book is a glimpse into the often-disordered world of game development. Readers will gain solid advice and know-how that can bring some order to the often-chaotic world found in game development.

About the Author

Andrew Rollings has a B.S. in Physics from Imperial College, London, and Bristol University. He has worked since 1995 as a technical and design consultant spanning many industries. Andrew lives in Auburn, Alabama, and can be contacted at a.rollings@hiive.com.

Dave Morris has worked as a designer and creative consultant on PC and console games for several major publishers, most notably Eidos. His strategy game Warrior Kings reached number six in the United Kingdom PC charts. He has done creative development and scriptwriting on television shows for Endemol, Pearson, TV2 Norway, and the BBC. He has also written more than a dozen novels, gamebooks, and movie novelizations, and in 1991 he was the UK's top-selling author. He is currently writing the screenplay for the film version of the classic adventure game The Seventh Guest. Dave lives in London, England, and can be contacted at david.j.morris@dial.pipex.com.

Customer Reviews

Practical advice for the underperforming developer
This book, though well worth reading, is definitely a mixed bag. Split broadly between game design and game production, both are covered quite extensively but with a lot of repetition.

It starts well when describing different aspects of game design, listing some key concerns and doing well at steering clear of the "first, pick a genre" trap. But when it comes to the details of low level design, it seems to settle on the "everything is rock-paper-scissors" approach. There are some interesting variations on this theme, but some alternative perspectives would have been welcome, especially those that might hold true beyond the RTS/FPS ground that the mathematical approaches model well.

When it comes to the production process, the book seems to be squarely aimed at the underperforming team rather than the average or good one, as much of the advice seems to assume dysfunctional relationships, poor management, and a team of selfish developers. In fact, several of the tips given are tempered by telling us that top sellers like Doom and Starcraft "probably didn't use" some of these tricks, because they were too good to need to. In other words, Rollings and Morris go down the route that many others use when advocating their methodology, extolling it as a system to get the most out of a mediocre developer, rather than a way to create a great product.

Later parts of the book tend to repeat a few general themes, such as iterative development, focusing on creating working components and code-reuse, the merits of design patterns, etc. Most of these things are well-known to the educated developer, and repeated insistences that they are worth using (with graphs of arbitrary data to help convince us) are not going to change any minds.

Some parts seem opinionated and dogmatic, and sometimes even contradictory. Why suggest that imposing an arbitrary dress code will somehow make people work harder in the absence of cited evidence? Why waste time caricaturing five different types of 'problem developer' (which in this case is assumed to be synonymous with 'problem coder' - artists and designers are obviously perfect!) instead of just tackling the individual issues? Why use the phrase "start with a well-designed product, and then plan the marketing" in a sample design document, but in the very previous chapter make it very clear that you think the Marketing department should be treated by the developers as the end client for the product?

This last point is perhaps the most important one; this book is not about how to make good games as such, but about how to make enough of the resources at your disposal to make a game that is good enough and marketable enough to keep you in business. There is enough common sense here to turn any randomly-assembled rabble of developers into a group that can probably ship something, given management with enough determination. But if you're already at that standard, or are able to work outside the constraints of a typical professional team of developers, most of the knowledge here will be of limited use.