programming

"Ultimate Games Design" There seems to be no shortage of games design books, and they all claim to be the ultimate. All of them wants to deal primarily with the big fluffy ideas of the lead design - the overall idea of the game and so forth. Few of them has anything to say about the actual execution in terms of level design for example.

Untill now. Despite hating the title (and the colour scheme) of this book, I have to bow to the ultimate thing. This is as good a good as you will get right now about actually building game worlds - the level designs, the modelling, the texturing, the lighting and so forth. It also has one of the mandatory chapters on getting into the industry, where Tom Meigs goes beyond the usual war stories from the pros and repetitive listing of roles in the games industry, to actually offer the reader a good ammount of introspective questions to ponder and sage advice to gear up for the bumpy ride ahead.

So from hating it, this book has become one of my absolute favourites on games design. Well done Tom Meigs, whoever you are!

I really enjoyed this book! I have some limited experience in game development, and this book really helped fill in the blanks for me. It was highly recommended by a friend who already works in the game industry -- and on several websites. I wasn't disappointed. I think it's the best book available. The book flowed easily from chapter to chapter.

Previsualization - Level Planning and Building - Lighting - Texturing - Particles - Effects - Actors - Props - Audio
Camera Control - Genre Design - Scripting - QA - MMOGs - Wireless

It's all covered in pretty balanced detail. I finally feel like I understand how all this stuff relates in building a game and no single book had helped me this way before.

I bought several other books on game design - but they were either too general or didn't really seem to cover the stuff you need to really get going in this area. Highly recommended!

This book is very useful, it has provided many information not found elsewhere. I highly recommend this book. As a game designer myself, it has been helpful for me in many ways.