7 ms·

Books for Game Developers

203 points by Decabytes 3y ago

kaycey2022 3y ago
Sounds like a massive waste of time
nelno 3y ago
Amazingly, this thread was posted on what would have been Jan Paul's birthday. Care was taken to ensure his website would remain active, and it's heart-warming to see that people are still finding it useful. Johannes Marinus Paulus van Waveren was absolutely brilliant and the kind of person who left a lasting impression on those who knew him. He is sorely missed.
meheleventyone 3y ago
Missing any Game Design books so my picks: Game Feel - Steve Swink - 2008 The Art of Game Design a Deck of Lenses - Jesse Schell - 2014 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School - Matthew Frederick - 2007 Writing for Games: Theory & Practice - Hannah Nicklin - 2022 Procedural Generation in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2017 Procedural Storytelling in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2019 A Theory of Fun - Raph Koster - 2013
- Cognitron 3y ago
  Another good one on the game design side of things: Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tynan Sylvester (RimWorld)
  - jaaron 3y ago
    Ha! I must have been editing my comment as you were writing yours. I just started into Sylvester's book.
- jaaron 3y ago
  Just want to add a +1 for these, particularly Art of Game Design, A Theory of Fun, and the Tanya Short/Tarn Adams books. To add to your list: I have a copy of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences that I recently started reading.
  - anttiharju 3y ago
    Also want to add +1 for A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. It's a very lightweight read with pictures, yet still changed the way I think about what is fun, and learning in general.
- mentos 3y ago
  +1 for A Theory of Fun Raph illuminated things about the psychology of what makes games fun that Id never realized nor seen before.
- mikro 3y ago
  I enjoyed this book to practice game design: Challenges for Games Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers - Brenda Romero / Ian Schreiber
tester457 3y ago
Good selection of older books. I didn't see [1] Game Programming Patterns. [1]: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
- OnlyMortal 3y ago
  I assume, given the headings there, it talks about Model/View/Controller as the way to organise a game (and an application as a whole)? If you’re interested in how to put a game together, MVC is an obvious model to follow. For those who don’t understand what I mean, you firstly worry about data and have a way to represent that. That data only been the “actors” state and position in the game. Nothing graphics related. Nothing to do with how they interact. This is the “model”. You then have completely separate code that can move those actors around by changing the values in the model. This will include state changes like collisions. No graphics involved. You then have separate code that draws the actors in the model based on their state. It isn’t obvious to many but this allows you to concentrate on the various areas that need coding. It also allows you to, say, easily change parts of the code as needs be.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  Game Programming Patterns was so helpful when I wrote a game engine! Both that book and Crafting Interpreters [0] by the same author are masterpieces. [0]: https://craftinginterpreters.com/ https://craftinginterpreters.com/
  - keyle 3y ago
    Read the game programming one, and reading this at the moment and completely agree.
jessetemp 3y ago
Circa 90s and early 2000s. I like how there's a whole book on quaternions. I've never understood them and I'm convinced every definition I've read was written by someone who also didn't understand them. I might try to find a copy if I ever dabble in 3d again Edit: To clarify, I understand the need for quaternions (to avoid gimbal lock), just not how to use them manually. Euler angles are simple enough, I can change whichever axis by some degrees or radians. But with quaternions I never understood what was going on under the hood
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  Whilst a lot of those books are old, some are covering subjects like Quaternions that have been well understood for hundreds of years if not much longer. They're not necessarily lacking in value. There's a lot there that's pretty evergreen.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  > quaternions Instead of representing a rotation by roll, pitch, and yaw... you represent rotations by a 4x4 matrix. As this is a 3-dimension problem being represented in a 4-dimensional matrix, you have some weirdness to the math (IE: you need an additional constraint) but otherwise things get easier. --------- "Why is it easier?" Because roll / pitch / yaw systems have Gimbal Lock. That's... pretty much all you need to know as far as I'm concerned. Its a different system of representing rotations for reasons that the "classic" system messes up in. ------------ The math for quaternions is hard, but... who uses math these days? Just go into Blender, click the Quaternion button, and click the up/down buttons on the Quaternion matrix to see how the different values rotate the object. Once you practice both "classic" (pitch/yaw/roll) vs "quaternions" for... I dunno... 10 minutes? It becomes blatantly obvious that quaternions are easier to use. Its not even close. And I'm not sure if anyone has to implement the math of them anymore in any circumstances, so its just a matter of practicing them inside a 3d modeling program to see how to use it. After you've learned how to use quaternions, then you go back and learn the math behind it. If you care to. Or don't, its not like you need to know what the matrix represents exactly... --------- EDIT: Consider animation. If you've got an object that's rotating from (roll: 90-degrees, pitch: 90-degrees, yaw: 0-degrees), into (roll: 0-degrees, pitch: 180-degrees, yaw: 90-degrees), and you change this by going... (90, 90, 0) (89, 91, 1) (88, 92, 2) ... (2, 178, 88) (1, 179, 89) (0, 180, 90) Did the object rotate and "look" correct in all frames? Now do the same with the 4x4 matrix quaternion. This is all just a simple click in Blender + animation keyframes. Does the object look better? Weird crap happens in the roll/pitch/yaw form. Weird in ways that's difficult to describe in words, but easy as crap to see in 30-seconds of Blender. So just pull out a 3d modeling program and look at the damn thing, its really obvious.
OCASMv2 3y ago
Do magazines count? https://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag https://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag
- pengaru 3y ago
  +1 Many toilet hours were spent reading dead-tree versions gdmag and ddj back in my youth.
wormius 3y ago
Huh - went to the main page to see who "Mr Elusive" was and found out that he was a Doom programmer and authored a lot of papers. https://mrelusive.com/publications/pubs_bytype.html https://mrelusive.com/publications/pubs_bytype.html His ACM contributions: https://dl.acm.org/profile/81504687994 https://dl.acm.org/profile/81504687994 And he died in 2017 :( "Carmack paid tribute to him with the comment that he was "the best developer I ever worked with, my right hand, and a good friend. It was an honor."" https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/obituary-jan-paul-van-waveren-longtime-id-software-programmer https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/obituary-jan-paul-...
chem83 3y ago
Any good books on ECS?
- Dudester230602 3y ago
  Given that ECS is just procedures (systems) mutating structured state (components, entities) any older book on Pascal programming should do.
i_c_b 3y ago
Wow. This post gave me emotional whiplash. I opened the collection of links, which is quite good if a bit old. But then I had a subconscious mental itch, and thought, wait... where had I heard the name mrelusive before? That sounds _really_ familiar. And then I remembered - oh, right, mrelusive, JP-what's-his-name. I've read a huge amount of his code. When I was working on Quake4 as a game programmer and technical designer, he was writing a truly prodigious amount of code in Doom 3 that we kept getting in code updates that I was downstream of. And he was obviously a terrifically smart guy, that was clear. But I had cut my teeth on Carmack's style of game code while working in earlier engines. Carmack's style of game code did, and still does, heavily resonate with my personal sensibilities as a game maker. I'm not sure if that particular style of code was influenced by id's time working with Objective-C and NeXTStep in their earlier editors, but I've long suspected it might have been - writing this comment reminds me I'd been meaning to explore that history. Anyway, idTech4's actual game (non-rendering) code was much less influenced by Carmack, and was written in a distinctly MFC-style of C++, with a giant, brittle, scope-bleeding inheritance hierarchy. And my experience with it was pretty vexed compared to earlier engines. I ultimately left the team for a bunch of different reasons a while before Quake4 shipped, and it's the AAA game I had the least impact on by a wide margin. I was thinking about all this as I was poking over the website, toying with the idea of writing something longer about the general topics. Might make a good HN comment, I thought... But then I noticed that everything on his site was frozen in amber sometime around 2015... which made me uneasy. And sure enough, J.M.P. van Waveren died of cancer back in 2017 at age 39. He was a month younger than me. I didn't really know him except through his code and forwards from other team members who were interacting with id more directly at the time. But what an incredible loss.
- mentos 3y ago
  My biggest takeaway from my time programming in Objective-C was not being afraid to name functions and variables more verbosely. Curious to hear what aspects of Objective-C you feel influenced id?
  - i_c_b 3y ago
    Well, as I say, I'd been meaning to look into this in more detail because it's something I'd been long curious about. But I don't think I have time right now to dig into it.
dang 3y ago
Related: Books For Game Developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309464 - Sept 2013 (32 comments) Normally we downweight lists (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37518838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37518838 from yesterday) but the top comments in this thread are so good, I'm exempting this one.
richardjam73 3y ago
Some of these are available to be borrowed from the Internet Archive. Some are free to download.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Electrified 3y ago
It took awhile, but I finally found all of the books in the 'Game Development Essentials' series by Jeannie Novak (https://www.jeannie.com/gde https://www.jeannie.com/gde) • Game Development Essentials: An Introduction (3rd Edition) • Game Interface Design (2nd Edition • Mobile Game Development • Game Industry Career Guide • Game QA & Testing • Game Audio Development • Game Level Design • Online Game Development • Gameplay Mechanics • Game Simulation Development • Game Artificial Intelligence • Game Project Management • Game Story & Character Development
vishaalk 3y ago
Does anyone know if the books in this list cover "gameplay systems"? I am 9 months into my game dev job after 7 years of experience at SaaS, and I looked a lot for examples of how to design something like a buff/debuff system or passives and came up short. Would appreciate some literature in this space because I feel like so many games have them that I don't want to re-invent the wheel each time.
okaleniuk 3y ago
What do you think about Geometry for Programmers? https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers It has been recently published (April 2023) and not yet in any lists.
Electrified 3y ago
It took awhile, but I finally found all of the books in the 'Game Development Essentials' series by Jeannie Novak • Game Development Essentials: An Introduction (3rd Edition) • Game Interface Design (2nd Edition • Mobile Game Development • Game Industry Career Guide • Game QA & Testing • Game Audio Development • Game Level Design • Online Game Development • Gameplay Mechanics • Game Simulation Development • Game Artificial Intelligence • Game Project Management • Game Story & Character Development
PCMDAVE 3y ago
And none of the books in this list will make for a FUN game, because there are no Game Design books.
PCMDAVE 3y ago
And none of the books in this list will help you make a FUN game because there are no Game Design books.

203 points by Decabytes 3y ago

kaycey2022 3y ago

Sounds like a massive waste of time

Amazingly, this thread was posted on what would have been Jan Paul's birthday. Care was taken to ensure his website would remain active, and it's heart-warming to see that people are still finding it useful. Johannes Marinus Paulus van Waveren was absolutely brilliant and the kind of person who left a lasting impression on those who knew him. He is sorely missed.

meheleventyone 3y ago

Missing any Game Design books so my picks: Game Feel - Steve Swink - 2008 The Art of Game Design a Deck of Lenses - Jesse Schell - 2014 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School - Matthew Frederick - 2007 Writing for Games: Theory & Practice - Hannah Nicklin - 2022 Procedural Generation in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2017 Procedural Storytelling in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2019 A Theory of Fun - Raph Koster - 2013

Cognitron 3y ago
Another good one on the game design side of things: Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tynan Sylvester (RimWorld)
- jaaron 3y ago
  Ha! I must have been editing my comment as you were writing yours. I just started into Sylvester's book.
jaaron 3y ago
Just want to add a +1 for these, particularly Art of Game Design, A Theory of Fun, and the Tanya Short/Tarn Adams books. To add to your list: I have a copy of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences that I recently started reading.
- anttiharju 3y ago
  Also want to add +1 for A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. It's a very lightweight read with pictures, yet still changed the way I think about what is fun, and learning in general.
mentos 3y ago
+1 for A Theory of Fun Raph illuminated things about the psychology of what makes games fun that Id never realized nor seen before.
mikro 3y ago
I enjoyed this book to practice game design: Challenges for Games Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers - Brenda Romero / Ian Schreiber

tester457 3y ago

Good selection of older books. I didn't see [1] Game Programming Patterns. [1]: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

OnlyMortal 3y ago
I assume, given the headings there, it talks about Model/View/Controller as the way to organise a game (and an application as a whole)? If you’re interested in how to put a game together, MVC is an obvious model to follow. For those who don’t understand what I mean, you firstly worry about data and have a way to represent that. That data only been the “actors” state and position in the game. Nothing graphics related. Nothing to do with how they interact. This is the “model”. You then have completely separate code that can move those actors around by changing the values in the model. This will include state changes like collisions. No graphics involved. You then have separate code that draws the actors in the model based on their state. It isn’t obvious to many but this allows you to concentrate on the various areas that need coding. It also allows you to, say, easily change parts of the code as needs be.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
Game Programming Patterns was so helpful when I wrote a game engine! Both that book and Crafting Interpreters [0] by the same author are masterpieces. [0]: https://craftinginterpreters.com/ https://craftinginterpreters.com/
- keyle 3y ago
  Read the game programming one, and reading this at the moment and completely agree.

jessetemp 3y ago

Circa 90s and early 2000s. I like how there's a whole book on quaternions. I've never understood them and I'm convinced every definition I've read was written by someone who also didn't understand them. I might try to find a copy if I ever dabble in 3d again Edit: To clarify, I understand the need for quaternions (to avoid gimbal lock), just not how to use them manually. Euler angles are simple enough, I can change whichever axis by some degrees or radians. But with quaternions I never understood what was going on under the hood

meheleventyone 3y ago
Whilst a lot of those books are old, some are covering subjects like Quaternions that have been well understood for hundreds of years if not much longer. They're not necessarily lacking in value. There's a lot there that's pretty evergreen.
dragontamer 3y ago
> quaternions Instead of representing a rotation by roll, pitch, and yaw... you represent rotations by a 4x4 matrix. As this is a 3-dimension problem being represented in a 4-dimensional matrix, you have some weirdness to the math (IE: you need an additional constraint) but otherwise things get easier. --------- "Why is it easier?" Because roll / pitch / yaw systems have Gimbal Lock. That's... pretty much all you need to know as far as I'm concerned. Its a different system of representing rotations for reasons that the "classic" system messes up in. ------------ The math for quaternions is hard, but... who uses math these days? Just go into Blender, click the Quaternion button, and click the up/down buttons on the Quaternion matrix to see how the different values rotate the object. Once you practice both "classic" (pitch/yaw/roll) vs "quaternions" for... I dunno... 10 minutes? It becomes blatantly obvious that quaternions are easier to use. Its not even close. And I'm not sure if anyone has to implement the math of them anymore in any circumstances, so its just a matter of practicing them inside a 3d modeling program to see how to use it. After you've learned how to use quaternions, then you go back and learn the math behind it. If you care to. Or don't, its not like you need to know what the matrix represents exactly... --------- EDIT: Consider animation. If you've got an object that's rotating from (roll: 90-degrees, pitch: 90-degrees, yaw: 0-degrees), into (roll: 0-degrees, pitch: 180-degrees, yaw: 90-degrees), and you change this by going... (90, 90, 0) (89, 91, 1) (88, 92, 2) ... (2, 178, 88) (1, 179, 89) (0, 180, 90) Did the object rotate and "look" correct in all frames? Now do the same with the 4x4 matrix quaternion. This is all just a simple click in Blender + animation keyframes. Does the object look better? Weird crap happens in the roll/pitch/yaw form. Weird in ways that's difficult to describe in words, but easy as crap to see in 30-seconds of Blender. So just pull out a 3d modeling program and look at the damn thing, its really obvious.

OCASMv2 3y ago

Do magazines count? https://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag https://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag

pengaru 3y ago
+1 Many toilet hours were spent reading dead-tree versions gdmag and ddj back in my youth.

wormius 3y ago

Huh - went to the main page to see who "Mr Elusive" was and found out that he was a Doom programmer and authored a lot of papers. https://mrelusive.com/publications/pubs_bytype.html https://mrelusive.com/publications/pubs_bytype.html His ACM contributions: https://dl.acm.org/profile/81504687994 https://dl.acm.org/profile/81504687994 And he died in 2017 :( "Carmack paid tribute to him with the comment that he was "the best developer I ever worked with, my right hand, and a good friend. It was an honor."" https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/obituary-jan-paul-van-waveren-longtime-id-software-programmer https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/obituary-jan-paul-...

chem83 3y ago

Any good books on ECS?

Dudester230602 3y ago
Given that ECS is just procedures (systems) mutating structured state (components, entities) any older book on Pascal programming should do.

i_c_b 3y ago

Wow. This post gave me emotional whiplash. I opened the collection of links, which is quite good if a bit old. But then I had a subconscious mental itch, and thought, wait... where had I heard the name mrelusive before? That sounds _really_ familiar. And then I remembered - oh, right, mrelusive, JP-what's-his-name. I've read a huge amount of his code. When I was working on Quake4 as a game programmer and technical designer, he was writing a truly prodigious amount of code in Doom 3 that we kept getting in code updates that I was downstream of. And he was obviously a terrifically smart guy, that was clear. But I had cut my teeth on Carmack's style of game code while working in earlier engines. Carmack's style of game code did, and still does, heavily resonate with my personal sensibilities as a game maker. I'm not sure if that particular style of code was influenced by id's time working with Objective-C and NeXTStep in their earlier editors, but I've long suspected it might have been - writing this comment reminds me I'd been meaning to explore that history. Anyway, idTech4's actual game (non-rendering) code was much less influenced by Carmack, and was written in a distinctly MFC-style of C++, with a giant, brittle, scope-bleeding inheritance hierarchy. And my experience with it was pretty vexed compared to earlier engines. I ultimately left the team for a bunch of different reasons a while before Quake4 shipped, and it's the AAA game I had the least impact on by a wide margin. I was thinking about all this as I was poking over the website, toying with the idea of writing something longer about the general topics. Might make a good HN comment, I thought... But then I noticed that everything on his site was frozen in amber sometime around 2015... which made me uneasy. And sure enough, J.M.P. van Waveren died of cancer back in 2017 at age 39. He was a month younger than me. I didn't really know him except through his code and forwards from other team members who were interacting with id more directly at the time. But what an incredible loss.

mentos 3y ago
My biggest takeaway from my time programming in Objective-C was not being afraid to name functions and variables more verbosely. Curious to hear what aspects of Objective-C you feel influenced id?
- i_c_b 3y ago
  Well, as I say, I'd been meaning to look into this in more detail because it's something I'd been long curious about. But I don't think I have time right now to dig into it.

dang 3y ago

Related: Books For Game Developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309464 - Sept 2013 (32 comments) Normally we downweight lists (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37518838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37518838 from yesterday) but the top comments in this thread are so good, I'm exempting this one.

richardjam73 3y ago

Some of these are available to be borrowed from the Internet Archive. Some are free to download.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Electrified 3y ago

It took awhile, but I finally found all of the books in the 'Game Development Essentials' series by Jeannie Novak (https://www.jeannie.com/gde https://www.jeannie.com/gde) • Game Development Essentials: An Introduction (3rd Edition) • Game Interface Design (2nd Edition • Mobile Game Development • Game Industry Career Guide • Game QA & Testing • Game Audio Development • Game Level Design • Online Game Development • Gameplay Mechanics • Game Simulation Development • Game Artificial Intelligence • Game Project Management • Game Story & Character Development

vishaalk 3y ago

Does anyone know if the books in this list cover "gameplay systems"? I am 9 months into my game dev job after 7 years of experience at SaaS, and I looked a lot for examples of how to design something like a buff/debuff system or passives and came up short. Would appreciate some literature in this space because I feel like so many games have them that I don't want to re-invent the wheel each time.

okaleniuk 3y ago

What do you think about Geometry for Programmers? https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers It has been recently published (April 2023) and not yet in any lists.

Electrified 3y ago

It took awhile, but I finally found all of the books in the 'Game Development Essentials' series by Jeannie Novak • Game Development Essentials: An Introduction (3rd Edition) • Game Interface Design (2nd Edition • Mobile Game Development • Game Industry Career Guide • Game QA & Testing • Game Audio Development • Game Level Design • Online Game Development • Gameplay Mechanics • Game Simulation Development • Game Artificial Intelligence • Game Project Management • Game Story & Character Development

PCMDAVE 3y ago

And none of the books in this list will make for a FUN game, because there are no Game Design books.

PCMDAVE 3y ago

And none of the books in this list will help you make a FUN game because there are no Game Design books.