Customer Reviews

Awesome Game Creation: No Programming Required (Second Edition) (Game Development Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book is fine - but don't buy the book for the CD. The entire CD is almost all trial software. The only full versions are very old, buggy, and a few of them won't install on Windows XP.

The book is more a tutorial of the trial software included on the CD than anything else. If your looking for a way to create your first game ever and don't care to go farther than that - this is the book. If your looking for a road to a 'good' game - then go get something else.

Now in its second edition "Awesome Game Creation" is a complete course in computer game creation. The first chapters cover the basics of graphics and sound creation, manipulation, and editing. This is followed by a somewhat nostalgic chapter on the history of game development and the various genres of games. Finally, the last of the foundational information is supplied in the chapter on game designing elements.

With that background firmly in mind, the authors take you on what is basically a visual tour of game development history. First you start out making simple two-dimensional games with simple graphics and move from there up to making three-dimensional games with advanced polygon graphics.

Some of the software supplied with the book are complete versions, some allow you to create a fully functional game but don't allow you to make a game you can distribute, and others are thirty-day demo versions of the software.

Besides basic image editors and sound editors, the supplied software includes game creation engines and commercial game editors. The game creation software includes Game Maker, Games Factory, Pie 3D Game Creation System, and 3D Gamemaker. Other software includes GMax to modify commercial games, MilkShape 3D polygon modeler, and Paint Shop Pro.

How awesome of a game can you create with the knowledge gained from this book? Well that is actually a function of the creativity of the game creator. Even with the best software you can't create a truly awesome game if you have limited creative ability. On the other hand, I have seen creative people make amazing games with far more simplistic software than this. This is a recommended book for anyone with more of a creative spirit than a knowledge of programming.

The reason why I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 is because it did a good job of taking you step by step through GameMaker 4. But like all things produced by the computer industry, quality control was lacking.

First, the version of GameMaker that is on the CD didn't hve one of the files you needed for the exercise in chapter 7. I was able to get it off the book's web site.

Second, in the exercise in chapter 8, you build a simple asteroids game. The problem is, the book never goes into how to set the game up to actually fire a shot from the space ship. Therefore you can not shoot at the asteroids, all they do is just bounce around on the screen.

That was enough for me. Chapters 1-6 just go through items like "Elements of Designing a Game" (ch5) and "The History of Game Developement" (ch4), so I just skimmed through those to get to the hands on stuff.

That is all I have read so far, and will ever. In the end, game creation is very difficult. If you want to produce a game you are going to have to learn DirectX and C++, and that is where I am going to spend my time from now on. The idea behind GameMaker is that there is a short cut. In my opinion, if you were to spend the same amount of time with DirectX and C++ as you would figuring out this book (and the GameMaker engine that comes with it) you would have a much better game, and in the long run I think you would spend less time.

Advice to hobbiest game creators. If all you want to do is create a 2D game. Setting up the DirectX environment for just that is really quite easy. You only need a few chapters from the the big thick books on DirectX. It is only when you go 3D that things become complex.

The reason why I bought this book was to see if I could save some developement time by using something like GameMaker. All I want to do is create a 2D strategy game. By going back to creating the DirectX environment myself, I know I will have much more control over the environment, get better graphics, and future revisions to the game will be easier.

This book is pretty good, but as mentioned by another reviewer the software is pretty much out of date now.

The book is for anyone who wants to make games without the need to learn how to program. So it's aimed at teens and above. Very simple to get into, and not heavy like all the standard programming language books.

If you are interested in this book I would recommend looking at the alternative book - "Make Amazing Games in Minutes". The Amazing book carries the latest version of The Games Factory (Version 2 - to be released in 2006),while the Awesome book is running a very old demo version 1.06 (released in 1996). The new version isnt limited to 256 colors like this one.

Theres not alot to choose between them, so Amazing comes out the winner, being the newer book and running a newer version of the product.

Being a newcomer to the game development industry, I found this book to be very informative. The elements of game design covered in the book are pretty straightfoward, and it gives the reader a good understanding of the basics of game design documents and so on.

The down side to this book is that it covers a lot of programs that you can't/won't use for making a commercial product, like GameMaker. These programs are good to learn to get an idea of how things work and link together, which is important knowledge for scripting a game, but little else can be acquired from learning them.

The other bad thing about this book is that even though this is the 2nd edition, not all the files on the CD match up with the files reffered to in the book. This is a bit of a letdown, as I was hoping to see a sample of a more involved game design document.

Ultimately, its a good starting point, but you'll need more books after this one for certain.

If you just want to play with the idea of making games, this book is okay. But don't expect to make anything spectacular. The software on the CD is outdated and all trial but one in which you can only use a pallette of 256 colors. Forget upgrading. The company which made the 3D software and engine went out of business about two years ago and the last version was too buggy and cumbersome to be practical.

I wouldn't buy it today due to there being better sources of free 3D modeling and game making engines on the internet that surpass the book's content.

Elementary graphics stuff. Beginner material about how games came to be - and are. An acceptable resource for developing 2D games (sans programming), though the 3D part is pretty dated.

I'm just starting to learn game development and this is the 3rd book I have purchased. It's AWESOME!! The only book I have been able to use.

These reviews are from the previous edition, which is now OUT OF Print.The second edition was just published in mid June 2002.