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Making Great Games: An Insider's Guide to Designing and Developing the World's Greatest Video Games
Join videogame industry veteran Michael Thornton Wyman on a series of detailed, behind-the-scenes tours with the teams that have made some of the most popular and critically acclaimed videogames of the modern era. Drawing on insider's perspectives from a wide variety of teams, learn about the creation of a tiny, independent game project (World of Goo), casual game classics (Diner Dash, Bejeweled Twist), the world's most popular social game (FarmVille) as well as the world's most popular MMORPG (World of Warcraft), PC titles (Half Life 2) to AAA console games (Madden NFL 10), and modern-day masterpieces (Little Big Planet, Rock Band, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves). Hear directly from the creators about how these games were made, and learn from their stories from the trenches of videogames production. This book is an excellent resource for those working directly on game design or production, for those aspiring to work in the field, or for anyone who has wondered how the world's greatest videogames get made.
- GenresGame Design
236 pages, Paperback
First published September 30, 2010
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January 19, 2011
Michael Thomas Wyman, Making Great Games: An Insider's Guide to Developing the World's Greatest Video Games (Focal Press, 2011)
First off, the bad news: the MSRP of Making Great Games is about the same as the MSRP of programming books six times its size. Given that this is a high-level survey that doesn't contain a line of code, to me it seems rather pricy for what you get; YMMV.
On the other hand, I find myself both impressed and horrified that any book entitled Making Great Games contains a chapter on Farmville. Once again, YMMV, but it does make sense. There won't be eighty-eight million players per month (which Farmville had at its peak) playing any of the games I wondered about the absence of here (an exhaustive list would take up the entire review, but the most obvious missing game-changer is Doom, the most registered shareware program of all time and the game that began the FPS craze back in the ice ages of 1994).
The book's first three-quarters or thereabouts takes high-level looks at ten games, interviewing one key player from each team and essentially talking through a post-mortem. You probably won't have heard of all of the games here (I'd heard of about half), but Farmville is joined by some other quintillion-sellers like World of Warcraft, so no matter your level of interest in gaming, you'll have heard of some. On the other end of the scale is two-man indie project World of Goo (oddly, one of the others I was familiar with). Truly, it is possible to post-mortem anything. These alternate with two- or three-page interviews with folks who worked on other games in other functions to give a broad overview of their profession, rather than a particular game. The rest of the book is, shall we say, a post-mortem of the post-mortems, in which Wyman looks at some commonalities that cropped up in the interviews and points to them tentatively as the thesis: this is how you make great games. I say “tentatively” because Wyman always adds the necessary disclaimers. As well he should, of course; as he says a few times, there is no one right way to do it, and the stories in this book are ample evidence of same.
I'm ultimately giving it a positive review, even though there's still a portion of my cranium telling me you're not really getting what you pay for with this one; I'm guessing that this is just a much more vertical-market title than I was taking it to be when I was reading the book description. Give yourself a chance to flip through a copy to make sure you're buying what you think you're buying before taking the rather expensive plunge. *** ½
First off, the bad news: the MSRP of Making Great Games is about the same as the MSRP of programming books six times its size. Given that this is a high-level survey that doesn't contain a line of code, to me it seems rather pricy for what you get; YMMV.
On the other hand, I find myself both impressed and horrified that any book entitled Making Great Games contains a chapter on Farmville. Once again, YMMV, but it does make sense. There won't be eighty-eight million players per month (which Farmville had at its peak) playing any of the games I wondered about the absence of here (an exhaustive list would take up the entire review, but the most obvious missing game-changer is Doom, the most registered shareware program of all time and the game that began the FPS craze back in the ice ages of 1994).
The book's first three-quarters or thereabouts takes high-level looks at ten games, interviewing one key player from each team and essentially talking through a post-mortem. You probably won't have heard of all of the games here (I'd heard of about half), but Farmville is joined by some other quintillion-sellers like World of Warcraft, so no matter your level of interest in gaming, you'll have heard of some. On the other end of the scale is two-man indie project World of Goo (oddly, one of the others I was familiar with). Truly, it is possible to post-mortem anything. These alternate with two- or three-page interviews with folks who worked on other games in other functions to give a broad overview of their profession, rather than a particular game. The rest of the book is, shall we say, a post-mortem of the post-mortems, in which Wyman looks at some commonalities that cropped up in the interviews and points to them tentatively as the thesis: this is how you make great games. I say “tentatively” because Wyman always adds the necessary disclaimers. As well he should, of course; as he says a few times, there is no one right way to do it, and the stories in this book are ample evidence of same.
I'm ultimately giving it a positive review, even though there's still a portion of my cranium telling me you're not really getting what you pay for with this one; I'm guessing that this is just a much more vertical-market title than I was taking it to be when I was reading the book description. Give yourself a chance to flip through a copy to make sure you're buying what you think you're buying before taking the rather expensive plunge. *** ½
Displaying 1 of 1 review