Game Programming Golden Rules (Game Development Series) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Martin Brownlow (Author) "Modern computer games are huge affairs, involving dozens of people..." (more)
Key Phrases: Studio Max

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Maximize your team’s game development time!

Writing computer games is hard. Games today are complex projects that involve large teams of specialized artists and programmers. These teams are perpetually pushing technology beyond its boundaries and stretching their skills to the max. To alleviate these problems, Game Programming Golden Rules presents a series of nine "Golden Rules" that help define a methodology for creating a modern game. Each rule is written as a simple principle and covered from the perspective of how it works in the overall structure of a game project. The rules cover a variety of topics from embracing C++ and scripting, to the resource pipeline, finite state machines, and optimization. The order in which the rules are presented was carefully chosen, so that each rule presents a topic that is then put to use in later rules. Many of the rules involve empowering the designers and artists to put their own content directly into the game, bypassing the need for a programmer’s involvement beyond the initial setup. This frees up the programmers’ time to concentrate on creating the systems that make the game, rather than focusing on the output of these systems. By the end of the book, you will have deeper confidence and a more profound understanding of the essential techniques of game programming and how the theory of these techniques interlocks. This is an excellent resource for the entire development team.

*Details essential rules that every game programmer should follow for fast and effective game development
*Teaches programmers how to ease the workload for themselves and the rest of the team
*Discusses topics that have immediate, practical applications— orders of complexity, hashes and hash functions, scripting, the resource pipeline, processing assets, finite state machines, saving game state, and optimization
*Provides a versatile reference that you’ll refer to again and again

ON THE CD:
* Production-quality example programs referenced in the text, both binary and source form
* A full distribution of the most current version of the Zlib compression library
* All the figures from the book

About the Author
Martin Brownlow has been a professional video game programmer for 10 years, and has received numerous programming accolades and awards for his work on both MDK and Sacrifice. He also contributed to Game Programming Gems 3. He has worked for such companies as Virtuality Entertainment, Shiny Entertainment, Tremor Entertainment, and Visual Concepts. He recently worked on Armed & Dangerous for the Xbox and PC.

Product Details

• Paperback: 318 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (March 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584503068
• ISBN-13: 978-1584503064
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #528,809 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The Charles River Media Game Development Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for beginners., May 26, 2007

By	Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Martin Brownlow, Game Programming Golden Rules (Charles River Media, 2004)

The main thing you need to know about this book is that if you're new to programming, or you've been programming in languages that hide pointers (e.g, VB.NET or C#) and you're not terribly familiar with the pointer architecture of C or C++, you might want to hold off on buying this until you've familiarized yourself with some intermediate-to-advanced programming concepts.

Once you're on the right level for the book, however, you are likely to find it a valuable reference tool as you progress through a project. I'd suggest reading it straight through at least once so you know where to go to find that little tidbit that's tugging at the back of your mind when you're trying to figure out what you need to do to, say, optimize your rendering pipeline. After that, keep it on the closest bookshelf to your primary dev machine; you'll be referring back to it on a fairly regular basis unless you have a photographic memory. (...)