So, I was at the WSU Tri-Cities library the other day, cruising through my favorite section (the computer programming books, of course!) and I spotted a couple of books I donated to the library last year. I'm kind of weird that way. Every time I pass by something I donated, I say to myself "Yup, I used to own those books. Now the rest of humanity has a chance to benefit as I did." I think this, or something like this, to myself almost everytime I recognize something I donated. Anyway, I was passing through and I saw a book I had donated. It was a book on Game programming using DirectX 7 or something. I forget. Right next to that book was another book called "Game Design Foundations" by Roger E. Pedersen. I stopped and wondered to myself why the library would get this book cause gaming isn't something they're interested in. Didn't matter. I picked it up in all my excitement of having the chance to read yet another book on game design. I almost ran up to the check out desk, foaming at the mouth for this new information. I flipped through it and at first glance it seemed like a book worth of my time. Though, in reality, this book is really only worth the time of my trash can (which has mold growing at the bottom of it which I should take care of...soon)
So, that day I started reading it. The first couple of chapters gave the author's view on game design in general. Stuff like what game designers and producers are NOT and his principles of game design. My favorite principle was "KISS, or Keep It Simple, Stupid". Words to live by. After that, the book goes downhill. The chapter 5, Game Genres, is where some simple editing errors come to the fore front. His first miss is putting Baulder's Gate: Dark Alliance in the section for adventure games. For those of you not in the know, Dark Alliance is a console game for Playstation 2 (PS2), Gamecube (GC) and Xbox. It's basically a clone of Diablo, a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. There is no adventure in this game as compared to something like the Monkey Island games from LucasArts. Adventure consists of thinking through puzzles. Dark Alliance was the killing of the rats and orcs and collecting of their treasure. I'm not saying that it was a bad game. I really enjoyed it. You can even play with a friend. I'm just saying that Roger didn't has his facts straight. This happened many times again in this chapter.
The next error was in his Role-Playing Game (RPG) section. He lists both Dungeon Siege and Neverwinter Nights as games for the console. I personally visited Gas Powered Games, the makers of Dungeon Siege, back in October of 2003 where they said they had no plans on releasing it on any console platform. Considering this book was published earlier in 2003, before the trip to GPG, chalk one up for another bad edit job. As for Neverwinter Nights, to my knowledge, it has not yet reached the consoles. It may not even get there. But I digress. There are other mistakes in this chapter that tells me that the author and his editor did not do their homework.
The next chapter he gives a list of game ideas and movies you can steal ideas from. True, a good designer can borrow from a previous idea and make it better. But the author didn't really say that. It was just a list of games and movies. He could have offered up suggestions on ways to change them for the better. Alas, he didn't. Next chapter moved into the subject of research. This was new to me. This was about the only useful information in the book. Why I didn't know before hand is beyond me. Maybe I knew but I didn't want to admit to myself that this book was full of crap. I mean, how would you feel if you spent hours of your time reading a book full of crap? Pretty smelly I bet. Anyway, he basically says to research as much as you can on your chosen topic as you can't really pull any fast ones on the players who might be playing your game. It makes sense. I just wished he heeded his own advice.
In this chapter, he tries to do reviews of several games. When I say he tries, it was an half-ass try. There was no consistency between reviews. One review might have a section on the good and the bad, the next review might just have a section on the good and the following review will just have a description of the game. The descriptions of the games were varied as well. He went into way too much detail about the weapons of some games and hardly mentioned any in another game. He also sometime gave the system requirement specs. But I think he only did that twice for all the reviews he did, 27 reviews in total. If there was any useful information within, it was cleverly hidden. I wonder if there's a secret panel on the spine of the book to reveal the secret to the information held within.
About the only useful information that can found in this book is the listing of software and websites that can be useful on the trek towards zen game design. He lists many audio libraries that you can buy as well, in the appendix. Ok, there's one more good thing in here. And it's chapter 18. It's not good because it's the last chapter in the book. It's good cause it has a complete game design document for a poker game. It's pretty complete as it has audio sound bite lines of each character, sample graphics of the players, and complete rules of each Poker game supported. That's a lot of useful information just for a poker game. I hate see the design docs for games like Beyond Good and Evil.
So, as of right now, I'm only about half-way through the book. I haven't actually read chapter 18 yet. I may never. I am really fed up with this book and I am really glad the library decided to shell out money for this book before I did. On the back of the book, it says that the level was for beginner to intermediate. I don't think I could recommend this book to anybody. Dead objects, like the trash can, I can whole heartily suggest for. Just beware. And that's my final word on this book.
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