Any Game Design Recommded Reading books?

#1

I was hoping of some more experienced people could point me and other newbies in the direction of some reading materials for Games Design.

Personally I’m looking for information about building and texturing environments for games, inspirations, techniques, methods, anything really for insight and information.

I ask as I’m hoping to buy Half Life 2: Raising the Bar, hoping it will give me an insight into how things are done and laid out in a company, I’ve browsed some books about game Design, but they seem a little mainstream, centred around vague details that most people here would already know.

Any help is appreciated, and I hope I posted this in the correct place.

#2

“Raising the Bar” is a beautiful and inspirational book with lots of concept art and interesting accounts of the production process. If you’re a Maya user, you might also find this book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0782143768/102-0672282-8750535?v=glance
by Michael McKinley interesting, you can download a sample chapter here: http://www.sybex.com/sybexbooks.nsf/AdditionalContent/4376Sample?OpenDocument.
I haven’t read it and it seems to be geared mainly towards character artists, but the guy knows his stuff and has a nice way of teaching (a few of his tutorials are here http://www.mtmckinley.net/)

Most of the info is to be found on the web though, not sure if you know all this already, but have a look at http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/ and sign up at http://gamasutra.com, you can also buy and download Game Developer Magazine there. There are free video tutorials for several engines at http://3dbuzz.com, especially for Unreal Tournament. Also check out http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/ for an interesting community.

Once you have decided on an engine there are a few sites and message boards to choose from, starting with the engine developer’s pages, e.g. http://udn.epicgames.com and http://collective.valve-erc.com/. There’s a nice PDF on source mapping which you can download here http://files.webluke.net/index.php?dir=mapping/SM101/.

Cheers

#3

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