I finished reading two books recently, one about the making of Karateka (a game I’ve never played, but by the developer of the original Prince of Persia, which I’ve also never played), and the other about game design in general.
Karateka
This book was the inspiration for this dev journal, as it’s less of a “how I made a game” book and more of a “here is everything I wrote down as a teenager while making a game” book. A lot of it doesn’t have broader applicability to game development, but certain portions resonated with me. Especially the sections about motivation. It’s easy (sometimes) to know what you should do. It’s often harder to do it, for reasons that are both mystifying and frustrating.
Motivation isn’t quite the right word. There seems to be a difference between being motivated and actually doing something. The latter is an ongoing challenge for me. Sometimes I find myself simply doing nothing, paralyzed not with indecision but with…? I’m working on it.
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
I just finished reading this, and I already feel like I need to re-read it. If a book can make you a better game designer, it’s this one. It doesn’t have all the answers, but it has a glut of food for thought. “A Book of Lenses” is a very apt description/subtitle: it provides many, many different ways of analyzing game design, based on psychology, storytelling conventions, logic, and dozens of other facets.
This dev journal is mostly focused on the creation of StupidRPG (a game), but many of the lenses from The Art of Game Design are applicable to general software development. Understanding your audience, how they will use your product, and what you’re trying to accomplish are incredibly important. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to colleagues who have no interest in game development, but are involved in product development in some capacity.
Next Up
I’ve started reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. The existence of this sentence makes me feel pretentious somehow. I don’t understand this book yet, beyond the shared concept of ‘loops’ in fields of mathematics, music, logic, etc. The book (a reprint) contains a lengthy forward which addresses (sort of) the intent and meaning of the work. The gist seems to be that most people misinterpret what it’s about. This seems reasonable; a piece of literature that took decades to produce is unlikely to be fully comprehended on first reading.
On the plus side, it has a lot of interesting information about fugues, fractals, and other things starting with F.