Bond has made an excellent attempt to introduce game design to programmers and programming to game designers. Often times, these two areas are so disconnected that the fundamentals of both these areas are not well known to the other audience.
In Part 1, presented in 15 chapters, the author introduces the various aspects of game design. He outlines the need to think like a designer, the well-known frameworks for game design, and a deeper insight into some of these frameworks: the layered tetrad, the inscribed layer, the dynamic layer, and the cultural layer. He relates game design with human desires for structured conflict, experiences, and excitement. Throughout these chapters, he threads the concepts of mechanics and dynamics of the game (of the design and play of the game) and the aesthetics (the implications on socialization, culture, and meaning). In chapters 7 and 8, the author focuses on design aspects. He leads the reader into crafting interactive game experiences and reiterates the need for significant iterations and accurate scoping to get to a product that the audience will like. In chapter 8, the author focuses on the goals of the game itself and urges the reader to consider designer-centric as well as player-centric goals, which are treated in some depth. The need for early prototyping, testing at various stages, and striking the right balance between the mathematical concepts (probability/randomness) in improving gameplay is addressed next. Chapters 12 through 15 introduce other related issues for game development such as guidance for the player, including direct and indirect guidance; puzzle design to keep users engaged, with a summary of various types of puzzles in modern games; using an agile development process and its related terminologies; and the game industry in general.
In Part 2, the author introduces readers to fundamental programming concepts that are necessary for game creation. In chapters 16 and 17, the reader is provided with an overview of basic programming ideas and an introduction to the Unity game development environment. Bond recommends using C# over JavaScript for game development using Unity. The rest of this part provides a quick introduction to key programming concepts in C#, start up, project creation, variables, operators and decision statements, loops, collections, functions and parameters, debugging C# programs, classes and instances, and general object-oriented thinking.
In Part 3, the author goes through the development of eight prototypes of digital games--from a simple arcade game at the beginning, followed by infusing some physics fundamentals, levels, interactions, and state management. Then, Bond takes the reader through the integration of more complex programming concepts such as inheritance and the use of patterns and enumerations, dictionaries, interpolations, and function delegates to help make the game smoother and more graceful. In chapters 32 through 35, the author introduces card games and techniques such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) configurations, designing for mobile devices, and integrating Unity tools and extending them with features from Unity to make the game more interactive and fun. Chapter 35 takes readers through a complex game design by recreating an old game originally designed for the Nintendo Entertainment System, while also introducing them to complex ideas such as component design.
In summary, this book is quite well written and is simple to understand. It will be very useful for any undergraduate student interested in game design and development, either as a hobby or a career.
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