Customer Reviews

Postmortems from Game Developer: Insights from the Developers of Unreal Tournament, Black and White, Age of Empires, and Other Top-Selling Games

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Love this book. Each postmortem is full of advice about designing, producing, and shipping a video game - advice from the developers themselves - allowing YOU to learn from THEIR mistakes. Techincal gaffes, hiring snafus, political missteps, project management mistakes; anything that can go wrong in a software project HAS gone wrong in one of these stories.

When you get to the end of this book, you'll feel like a battle-hardened veteran that can take anything a project throws at you; and most of minefields mapped out are surpisingly appicable to ALL software development, not just video games.

Beware: this book may have you rummaging through discount bins to find the games mentioned- good or bad, you feel affection for a game once you've shared the trials and tribs of the creators.

I've read several game design books, including Mike McShaffry's Game Coding Complete. While reading architecture and design is good and many of the books reflect the author's experience on several projects, Game Developer Postmortems provides the actual triumphs and stumbling blocks each game project went through.

A quick read and the best way to get insight into these projects without actually having worked on the teams, it's a book I'd recommend to anyone looking to understand game design projects.

It's enjoyable to read this, to know what's behind the games.
But it doesn't go deep, neither with the people like the Two John book, neither technically.

Both my partner and I treasure the wealth of information available between the covers of this book. We are making the difficult shift from TV production to game production and it is fascinating to see where other teams and their leaders got things wrong and right. With great examples from a wide variety of games (Some that we personally love playing) there is a well rounded selection.

I hate to use the term "must have" but... this book is a must have for anybody in or wanting to be in the game industry.