Hot answers tagged books
48
Android might not be the best choice for starting game development because you would be learning several different things at the same time (Android SDK, making games, optimization, different phone models, etc.). Consider making some simple Java games on your computer to get familiar with making games in general; this tutorial looks like a good place to ...
42
Game development is like structural engineering
There are minimum requirements for functionality. The minimum requirements are not exceptionally challenging and many people can learn how to fulfill them. That's the function part. It's the small part. This is where the decisions of what language to use, platform to develop on, or what libraries to utilize ...
39
There are lots of results at Stack Overflow for android game. Lucky for you, I went through all of them and picked out the relevant ones to your question.
"Where to start game programming for Android"
"How did you get started with game development in Android"
"Tutorials and libraries for OpenGL-ES games on Android"
"android opengl game"
"Is there any ...
25
Yes, not having someone that have been there before to say to you what to do, how to fix, etc etc may be the worst thing you'll pass. But no fears! You still can read LOTS of blogs of people that have been there, they share their experiences in the industry, how they got into the success, how a previous game failed and why, etc etc.
Good examples are:
...
21
The first tip you'll get is this - don't.
Modern compilers are actually really really good at optimizing code, and will be much more likely to do a better job of it than any self-rolled assembly language you may write.
The exception would be any specific case where you have determined for certain that the compiler is doing a bad job of optimizing, so ...
16
I'll be the one going against the grain here and say, it is never too early to learn about optimizations, especially assembly optimizations and more importantly, debugging in assembly. I believe that you will gain the maximum benefit of it if you are a student (because then you have very little to lose [i.e. time/money wise]) and everything to gain.
If you ...
13
Not a book, but you should check out the math curriculum over at the Khan Academy. I'm in the process of using these videos to brush up on my own math skills. They cover an extremely broad range of material, and the author has been praised for his teaching style.
IMO, truly an amazing resource.
http://www.khanacademy.org/#Linear Algebra
13
Even though they don't come with "educational engines", you might want to have a look at these two excellent blogs. They are written by industry professionals who more or less build engines for a living and they tend to focus on the plumbing in between systems a lot.
Molecular Musings - Stefan Reinalter on game engine design - some example posts:
Wiring ...
12
Usually, solid optimisation doesn't depend on using Assembly, or doing micro-optimisations with code in higher level languages. If you read a lot of research papers (as I do -- or try to!), you'll see that oftentimes the improvements made to algorithms are at a broader conceptual, "qualitative" level, rather than at the more "quantitative" level of ...
11
This attitude. This "don't touch it, until you know how to do it perfectly" attitude. That'll really hold you back.
You see this attitude among beginning developers of all kinds though - not just games. Websites as well. Hey, a website is a database with an html front end with some javascript. You learn the technologies any way you can, you put your ...
10
Sergio you might want to aim more toward a Game Development math book like
Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications, Second Edition: A Programmer's Guide
Instead of the classical Linear Algebra you would learn in college. Also like Ron Warholic said, stating what your math comfort level is would better help us taylor a specific book.
10
While I can't link you to the actual documents used by "proper" published console games (and, really, unless that's what you're doing, you don't need them), but here are the two documents used for XNA games that go up on Xbox Live Indie Games:
The Evil Checklist (things that games fail for)
The Not-So-Evil Checklist (additional quality considerations)
...
8
Depending on the type of game you're writing, you may be able to avoid some of the low-level network programming. Some types of games do not require a lot of back-and-forth communication between the clients and the server. In such cases, one could opt to use a higher level framework. For example, I am developing a turn-based strategy game in C#/.NET. ...
7
This blog has four links (the third is broken), the first of which seems like an amazing resource, the others seem pretty great too. I'm probably going to read over this just for funsies, should be a good read.
You could take a look at the Rigs of Rods engine, it's an open source soft-body vehicule simulator, it may give you some insight into how it's done, ...
7
I've been doing a lot of research on this topic in the past several months and have gathered quite a bit of resources that you might find useful. Although I haven't come across an actual book about it, these articles are pretty long (and comes in several parts) so they are pretty close :)
Take a look at these to get you started:
Virtual Economic Theory: ...
7
There are very few. Here are the only two I know of, one of which is still quite incomplete.
This first one is slowly becoming the "de facto" OpenGL tutorial.
http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/
This second one is only several chapters in with no updates in a while, but hopefully if enough people pester the author he'll keep working on it. I found the ...
7
Start making a game. That is how you get started in game development.
Asking other people how to start isn't starting. Searching Google isn't starting. Reading books isn't starting.
Actually writing code is starting. Making mock-ups using boards or cards or dice is starting. This is how you get started in game development, by starting to actually make ...
6
At the minute there is no support in XNA for Kinect (although, hopefully this will change in the near future).
There are two ways to develop for Kinect at the moment.
The first is to become a licensed Xbox developer (although it might be a little expensive :P)
The second is to use the open source drivers for Kinect known as OpenKinect (libfreenect, ...
6
Seeing as you were using Game maker, I'm assuming you're on Windows, so jump in at the deep end with the direct-x SDK. The samples provide source code, and also give you a taste of the power available to you. Just because you want to do a 2D game doesn't mean you should stick with a 2D library, at some point you'll probably want to do something the library ...
6
I would recommend staying away from that Cinder library. Browsing through the tutorials is about as demotivational as it can get. Pick something that's easy, fun and fast to code with, like SFML. Think of it as a modern object-oriented replacement for SDL. If the features satisfy your needs, install it, go through the tutorials and just start playing with ...
6
I pitched the concept for the Journal of Game Development to Charles River Media after we'd seen success on a few of the Game Programming Gems books. At the time we were starting to see a surge in the number of schools offering game development courses, or at least interested in offering them. We couldn't find anywhere that professors at these institutions ...
6
And I want to start from very start. Please tell me the skills,
technologies that one should posses while making it.
Start from the very start, eh? Well, first you're going to need to know math. A lot of math. Algebra, Trigonometry, Matrix Rotations, and a whole lot of physics if you want to do everything from scratch. This should take about 1-2 ...
6
Ok, one thing I learned about efficient learning is, don't just read. Program. The problems with "just reading" are twofold:
1) It's not very interesting, so progress can be slow
2) The knowledge evaporates quickly, unless you do activities which make it stick
So get a good book as a reference, so you have something to refer to, but above all start ...
5
Characters in videogames are strongly defined by what they do, particularly player characters. Lara Croft jumps, grabs, swims, and shoots. Mario's original name is "Jumpman." Megaman bosses are defined by their attacks. In other media, other qualities may come to the fore, such as character history, personality, perspective on life, or inner conflict. For ...
5
I've got this sort of info spread over many books on my bibliography, but I'm currently away from them. But from what I could gather up from memory and browsing through the table of contents online, I recall the following books:
3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development 1st Edition or Mathematics for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics
or
...
4
One of the major differences is that it is much more critical for a player to develop the attitude towards your character that you want them to. For example, if you are developing a character that will be accompanying the player for an entire level, or the entirety of the game, then it is important that the player like the character. If your character ...
4
I am beginner in game development, Although I have good programming skills. I am ready to learn. Please also recommend few good books.
Programming skills in what? jQuery isn't going to help, you need experience in C-like languages and extensive knowledge of 3d graphics and physics. Very few individuals can learn every aspect of these things needed for a ...
4
Depending on whether or not you want to make this your profession later on (Im just going to assume you're thinking about it and this isnt just a hobby thing), here's what I found to be extremely effective:
Start small
It's been said before, but i'll say it again - start with small bits, familiarize yourself with an engine, a framework, a tool or ...
4
The articles in the GPU Gems are more about techniques and not really about the technical abilities of the GPU offered through a revision of one graphics library or another. Some of those gems are really gems: explaining a concept that is still of interest, both in the means of approaching the problem and in implementation details. Before this gems series, I ...
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