Make Amazing Games In Minutes by Jason Darby
Published October 2005
List Price: $39.95,
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Charles River Media Price: $31.96
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Summary Many game enthusiasts have aspirations to create their own games but don?t know where to start. Make Amazing Games in Minutes introduces the game creation process to the aspiring game developer with no experience or programming ability. Taking the reader step-by-step through the various stages of developing a game and using the popular ?drag and drop? game creation software included on the CD-ROM, the reader can build his very own games. Using the tutorials and step-by-step methods, the reader will complete a fully playable retro game, as well as platform, bat & ball, and side-scrolling shoot-em up games. Other chapters cover more complex game features such as adding effects and scoreboards, porting the game onto the Web, and installation script building. This must-have book is the essential resource for anyone interested in learning game creation and the retro game style.
It's true that the title of this book does sound a bit overly ambitious. An amazing game? In minutes?? Of course, they could mean something like 180 minutes (three hours) rather than like, 15 or 20, and they could be assuming you have all the resources and assets ready to place into your game. Still, the title of the book isn't an empty promise - just don't expect to get down into the triple-digit minutes until you get the hang of the game creation software.
The book does a nice job of covering all the basic topics in terms of game types, design, and programming. The programming section does a nice job of explaining the basic programming concepts at a high-level, which is exactly the way you'll be dealing with them through the game maker. It's enough for readers to understand the concepts and give them a boost should they ever want to learn an actual language like BASIC, Visual Basic or C/C++ (among others of course).
Perhaps the best part of the book is that it doesn't waste the entire time detailing how to use the game maker software. It whisks you through brief overviews of what all the controls and doohickeys and thingamabobs do, and then it's straight on to the game making, where more detail on the various options, controls and properties come forth. In total you end up with four games: a Brickout clone, an Alien Invaders clone, a side-scrolling shooter and a platformer.
No doubt the biggest drawback to this book is that it locks you into a single game maker, The Games Factory from Clickteam. This isn't a slight against The Games Factory, but there are a lot of other game makers out there, and besides the general experience you get from making a game in The Games Factory, the majority of this book isn't applicable to anything else. It really makes me think this book should have been subtitled "Using The Games Factory".
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