So today I declare war on the game programming books. My goal is to make my way through at least 10 of them before the year is out. The first book I am tackling right now is "Sam's Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours" by Michael Morrison. Like many of the books written he is not the type of guy who authored any "real" game. So he is not John Carmack (programmer of Doom and all those Quake Engines) or Tim Sweeney (programmer of Unreal), or even the programmer of some old console game. I do see he has a website selling some simple iPhone apps. It appears from research on the Internet that the author is a professional writer. I do hope I learn something here.
The first chapter - Learning the Basics of Game Creation covers the basic - Why Video Games? Types of Video Games, Game Design (story, graphics, sound, etc). There is an interesting section on Object-Oriented Programming and Games. The must say I skipped most of this chapter since the topics are usually covered better and more in depth in books pertaining to game design. There is a delightful book I can highly recommend "Game Development Essentials: An Introduction" by Jeannie Novak. It is a bit expensive 48.00 on amazon.com and it would appear that used copies are only $10 less. I found it lightweight (oh, I should mention I actually read this one from end-to-end) but very interesting for students learning about the various aspects of game design. It had interesting sections on history, who plays and why, game elements, creating content. The book is a high-quality production with color and many mini-interviews with professionals in the field (and students). I gave the book 4 out of 5 stars and with time (2006) I see no other book has come close to covering the topics in well as Jeannie Novak's book so today I would increase my rating to 4.5 out of 5. I completed chapter 2 - A Windows Game Programming Primer. It just introduced a "skeleton" windows program (kind of like a "Hello World"). It managed to do that in a little over 20 pages. I have no problems at this time - see you tomorrow when I am done with Hour 3 - Creating an Engine for Games.
