Game Design Foundations, Second Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)The title of this book is "Game Design". You might think, therefore, that most of it would be devoted to the design aspect of making games. This is not the case.
Most of the book is a shallow survey of the different aspects of game development. Programming, art, audio, production, testing, and the various tools used by each department. Everything except design, it seems.
Pederson writes the book as if you have just been appointed the job of creative director on a videogame development team. If that's the case, it's silly for him to be giving this survey of information that you probably already know.
The first few chapters are actually about game design, but the ideas here mostly fall into two categories: stuff that a game design lead would already know, and stuff that is wrong. His formula for making games consists of reading the reviews for previous games in the same genre, keeping the good parts, and fixing the flaws. This is not a recipe for making a hit game. This is not how Tetris, Diablo, Zelda, or The Sims were made.
How about some advice for level or mission designers? How about some advice for anyone other than the ultimate authority of a game development team who wants to make their game better but doesn't know how?
The one thing I liked about this book was Pederson's point about how game ideas are a dime a dozen. It is so true; I've been working on games for ten years, and it always seems like I'm drowning in other people's ideas. I am glad I'm not the only one who feels this way, and I don't regret reading the book, if it was just for his persuasive arguments on this one point.

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Game Design Foundations, Second Edition covers how to design the game from the important opening sentence, the One Pager document, the Executive Summary and Game Proposal, the Character Document to the Game Design Document. The book describes game genres, where game ideas come from, game research, innovation in gaming, important gaming principles such as game mechanics, game balancing, AI, path finding and game tiers. The basics of programming, level designing, and film scriptwriting are explained by example. The designers understanding of the entire development team and the outlets for even the smallest development team to create fun content is highlighted. Each chapter has exercises to hone in on the newly learned designer skills that will display your work as a game designer and knowledge in the game industry.

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