Game Design Foundations with CDROM (Wordware Game and Graphics Library) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Most of the book is a shallow survey of the different aspects of game development. Programming, art, audio, production, testing, and the various tools used by each department. Everything except design, it seems.

Pederson writes the book as if you have just been appointed the job of creative director on a videogame development team. If that's the case, it's silly for him to be giving this survey of information that you probably already know.

The first few chapters are actually about game design, but the ideas here mostly fall into two categories: stuff that a game design lead would already know, and stuff that is wrong. His formula for making games consists of reading the reviews for previous games in the same genre, keeping the good parts, and fixing the flaws. This is not a recipe for making a hit game. This is not how Tetris, Diablo, Zelda, or The Sims were made.

How about some advice for level or mission designers? How about some advice for anyone other than the ultimate authority of a game development team who wants to make their game better but doesn't know how?

The one thing I liked about this book was Pederson's point about how game ideas are a dime a dozen. It is so true; I've been working on games for ten years, and it always seems like I'm drowning in other people's ideas. I am glad I'm not the only one who feels this way, and I don't regret reading the book, if it was just for his persuasive arguments on this one point.

Well this one was a letdown, because it contained very little information, I hadn't found for free on the internet. Here is what I wished I had known before forking out my cash...

The book starts off with a section where the author takes you through a few of his war stories and learned rules. A lot of them makes sense and are a good contribution to the book as such. An example could be "Share your toys", where Pedersen urges us to help others unselfishly, instead of trying to keep your experience and succes to yourself.

The next section is devoted to game ideas. In this chapter Pedersen lists more then 1200 ideas for games. The ideas consist of an extensive list of sports (of which many have been developed as games today), movies (where he lists the main idea behind each movie), board games, music and authors. Some of these have merrit, but the 1200+ number is not so solid. For example "mythology", "mythological creatures", "norse mythology" and "Irish mythology" are counted as 4 different game ideas. In my opinion, these first two sections are the most valuable in the book, and you should only consider buying it if these things have caught your attention.

The third section is devoted to research. One such object of research is a comparisson between the Rainbow Six and Delta Force series of games. Pedersen goes to great lengths to name every weapon in each game (+ their sequels and mission disks). In my book this doesn't really add value to the research. Whereas the parts about what is good and bad about each game is non-existent for quite a few of the examples and when it is existent it is limited to a few sentences like "has multiplayer support". Whereas research in design work obviously has its place, Pedersen really gets around the nitty gritty and important bits in an easy and rushed fashion.

The fourth part of the book is aimed introducing the games designer to the tools involved in building a game. Pedersen takes us through art and animation packages, game engines and sound tools to name a few. I wonder why this section is in the book, because everything reads like a marketing brochure for the individual products, so there is really no difference from what advertising materials you'd get from the respective producers of these tools. In this section we also get exposed to very basic programming and you learn to make your own tic-tac-toe game in Visual Basic. 5 pages are devoted to designing user interfaces. A good and welcome idea, but one could have wished for more then 5 pages, out of which several go to describe user interfaces in card games. Pedersen also tries to explain basic scriptwriting.

The last section (save the appendices) is devoted to different aspects of the design document. A basic attempt at explaining its use and structure. If you want to read about design documents and their application, I would suggest Luke Ahearn's Creating 3D Games That Sell, Rollings & Morris' Game Architecture and Design or Game Design Theory and Practise by Richard Rouse III.

When all is said and done, this book confuses me, because it tries to accomplish so many things(without an overarching structure), but does neither of them particularly well. It kinda reminds me of Luke Ahearn's Creating 3D Games That Sell, which is basically 3 different books attempted in one book. Just to clarify, that book contains sections which are easily worth the cover price. I am sorry, but Game Design Foundations will not teach you to be a games designer on your own, or how to break into the games industry as a budding games designer. Roger Pedersen got easily around this one; There are very few things you couldn't find on the net with half an hour of searching. If you are serious about learning games design and development, then get Rollings & Morris excellent book Game Architecture and Design, or if you just want a "foundation" course, check out Saltzman's Secret of the Sages. Sadly, this one doesn't deserve the cover price...