When I started to get into the game development world, I spent a lot of time to read and study, so today I what to advise you with some of the best game development books to read.
If you have time to read some of them I can assure you that you’ll have a much better understanding of the game development world.
Game Design Books
Here’s a short list of the best books related to the game design field.
Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development by Jeremy Gibson
This book is very good to get an introduction to game design. It’s full of concrete examples and is very easy to read
The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell
This is considered as the Bible of game design. It’ll give you all the basic notions that you’ll need to operate in the game design field, and it is very easy to read and is not too expensive
A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
Here is a sample review about this book: “Very insightful writing on what we are after in game design: Fun, This book won’t give you any magic formula to achieve Fun in designing a game, but it helps in getting a better understanding of those psychological mechanisms that drive the Fun basic feeling.” And this is exactly what this book is about.
Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by Eric Zimmerman
This book is mainly focused on theory and less on practice which makes this book a good complement to the established game design lectures. If you want a good and complete review about this book, have a look at this link.
Game Development Books
Game Programming Patterns
by This book is a very good resource to get an introduction to the most used patterns in the game development industry. Plus you’ll also have an overview of how a game engine works and how to write on top of it.
Programming Game AI By Example by Mat Buckland
AI is massively used inside games. Having an overview of how the artificial intelligence works and how to implement it inside your game is for sure a helpful skill to have.
Mathematics and Physics for Programmers by Danny Kodicek
Most of the people don’t like math and physics, but like it or not if you want to make games, you need to know at least the basics of them. This book is what you need to have all the instruments to use in your future game dev. Some topics are really heavy, but it’s always good to know them.
Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory
This book is very good if you want to understand how a game engine works. Even if today you have a lot of game engines ready to be used, it’s always good to know how they work just in case you have to customize some features of the game engine.
Real-Time Rendering by Tomas Akenine-Moller, Eric Haines, Naty Hoffman
This book is quite expensive but it’ll give you all the needed skill to understand the rendering pipeline, which is really important, specially if you’re developing a 3d game.
Improve your productivity and motivations
4 hours work week.
This book is not strictly related to the game dev world, but I found it full of tips and advices to improve your productivity, esteem and motivations. It’s a very good way for all those who want to become more productive and motivated in their jobs.
Suggested by the community:
- “Fundamentals of Game Design” by Earnest Adams
- “Game Feel” by
- “Secrets to rapid game development” by
Conclusion:
If you have any feedbacks about the books that I’ve mentioned or you know some other books that you’d like to share with the community, feel free to add those as a comment to the article or write to me and I’ll do that for you.
If you have other suggestions please leave it in the comment of the article. Thanks
