About the book

Foreword

This book is designed to teach people what video game design is, how video games work, and enable them to create them, from chumming up ideas and figuring out how to structure them to teaching them how a game engine can be designed to satisfy their requirements. You do not need any prior knowledge of video games to understand this book's subject, up to the implementation part that will expand upon game development techniques for many different types of media. Programming may not be required. Depending on what your goal is, you will need to understand how to program if you intend on going from design to production. You will also need to comprehend Object Oriented Programming to understand modular designs, and be able to understand C/C++ APIs, and have some basic 2D/3D graphics concepts like what a bitmap or a texture is and how they can be used. We will not deal with a specific API or programming language but C/C++ and ASM will be used for examples. The intention is to provide you with a broad vision of the possibilities available to create Video Games.

Guide to Readers

This is a wikibook (en.wikibooks.org), as such you should learn a bit about what it is and how it does its magic.

The book is organized into different parts, but as this is a work that is always evolving, things may be missing or just not where they should be, you are free to become a writer and contribute to fix things up...

Reader Comments

If you have comments about the technical accuracy, content, or organization of this document, please tell us (e.g. by using the "discussion" pages or by email). Be sure to include the section or the part title of the document with your comments and the date of your copy of the book. If you are really convinced of your point, information or correction then become a writer (at Wikibooks) and do it, it can always be rolled back if someone disagrees.

Guide to Writers

Authors/Contributors should register if intending to make non-anonymous contributions to the book (this will give more value and relevance to your opinions and views on the evolution of the work and enable others to talk to you) and try to follow the structure. If you have major ideas or big changes use the discussion area; as a rule just go with the flow.

Conventions: A set of conventions have been proposed to adoption on this book, please read about them before you contribute any content on the book's talk page.

Copyright Notice

Authors

The following people are authors to this book:

JC Leyba, Red revell infusion, Panic

You can verify who has contributed to this book by examining the history logs at Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/).

Acknowledgment is given for using some contents from other works like : Game Design and Programming, Making video games

The above authors release their work under the following license:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. In short: you are free to share and to make derivatives of this work under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you only distribute it under the same, similar or a compatible license. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Unless otherwise noted media and source code usable in stand alone form have their own copyrights and different licenses (but compatible with the Copyleft nature of the work). Media may be under Fair use, that is not recognized in some jurisdictions. Source code or scripts not listing copyrights or license information shall be considered in the public domain.

Video Game Design

Contents