Reddit reviews Game Programming Patterns

37.95$ or 32.05€ over at amazon.com. Ordering it right now. Fantastic.

Not C++ specifically, but if you happen to be developing in any sort of Object-Oriented way then Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom is a must.
It's available for free online if you wanna check it out before dropping money on it.

For design, get the combo of Jesse Schell's Book of Lenses and Deck of Lenses.

For dev get Nystrom's Game Programming Patterns

Same in germany. Notice the #1 Bestseller in Game Development tag? Congrats ;)

Edit: Actually #1 in all Computer & Internet related books in a foreign language.

this book is good https://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Patterns-Robert-Nystrom/dp/0990582906/

the authour has put the entire thing online for free

http://www.gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html

you could download SFML https://www.sfml-dev.org/ (a C++ framework that can be used to make games)

and then try and recreate these games
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB_ibvUSN7mzUffhiay5g5GUHyJRO4DYr

but make them more complete, more advanced and apply the concepts from the book

this book https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201615622/ is recommended on stackoverflow

Looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!

In case you're interested (and didn't already know), here's the price history for your own book. Amazon's prices are all constantly fluctuating, or at least 90% of them are, and algorithms must make 99.999% of those decisions. Sites like Camelcamelcamel allow us consumers to make the best choices despite that...

Edit: just noticed the price change that presumably flagged the guys at @GeekDailyDeal was actually an increase by a few cents, though it's still cheaper than for a long time

Book suggestions? Now that's my jam.

Out of all the books i've read, here are my recommendations regarding game programming:

Eric Lengyel's Books (only one out so far). This is aimed at game engine development, but if the 2nd onward are as indepth as the first, they will be amazing fundamental knowledge. Also, they're not thick, and jam packed with information.

Game Programming Patterns. The only book that comes more recommended than this is the one right below it by Jesse Schell. This book is fantastic, but you should write one or two small games to really get the most out of this book. You can also read it online on his website free, but then you don't get a pic of him and his dog on the back cover.

Book of Lenses. This is your intro/intermediate dive into game design. There are a lot of game design books, if you only read one, it should be this one.

Gane AI By Example. This book is a hodgepodge of fantastic techniques and patterns by those in AAA. There are other books on the series (like Game AI Pro) which are similar, but in my opinion (at least when I read AI PRO 3), they're not as good. But more knowledge is never bad.

Truthfully, as I sit here looking over all my books, those are the only ones i'd consider mandatory for any seasoned developer. Of course plenty of developers get by without reading these books, but they likely pick up all the principles listed herein elsewhere, in bits and pieces, and would likely have benefited having read them early on.

Here are a few others that I do recommend but do NOT consider mandatory. Sorry, no links.

Unity in Action. Personally, I recommend this or a more interactive online course version (udemy.com/unitycourse) if you want to learn unity while having a resource hold your hand. Having read the book, taken the course, AND taken Unity's own tutorials on the matter, i'd order them in order from Course being best, book second, videos from unity third. But none of them are bad.

Game Engine Architecture. This is the king for those who want a very broad introduction to making a game engine. It comes highly recommended from nearly anyone who reads it, just so long as you understand it's from a AAA point of view. Game Code Complete is out of print and unlikely to be revisited, but it is similar. These are behemoths of books.

Realtime rendering. This is one I haven't read, but it comes very highly recommended. It is not an intro book, and is also over 1000 pages, so you want this along side a more introductory book like Fundamentals of computer graphics. Truth be told, both books are used in courses in university at the third and fourth year levels, so keep that in mind before diving in.

Clean code. Yeah yeah it has a java expectation, but I love it. It's small. Read it if you understand Java, and want to listen to one of the biggest preachers on how not to write spaghetti code.

Rimworld guy, Tynaan sylvester I believe, wrote a book called Designing Games. I enjoyed it, but IMO it doesn't hold a candle to Jesse Schell's book. Either way, the guy did write that book after working in AAA for many years, then went on to create one of the most successful sim games in years. But yeah, I enjoyed it.

Last but not least, here are some almost ENTIRELY USELESS but interesting diagrams of what some people think you should read or learn in our field:

https://github.com/miloyip/game-programmer

https://github.com/utilForever/game-developer-roadmap

https://github.com/P1xt/p1xt-guides/blob/master/game-programming.md

I'd put them in this order: Experience, Knowledge, Portfolio, College

Nothing beats experience, and with it will come the knowledge. But it always helps to spend your free time reading, too. There's tons you can learn from books that will slip by you, even after decades of experience.

Then, a portfolio of your previous work is always more telling than a piece of paper saying you managed not to party yourself into a failing grade. (I'm a little salty about college.)

Game Patterns are going to be your most important thing to know if you want to get on the coding/development side. There's a book by Robert Nystrum - who worked for EA, and hangs out here on Reddit - that is one of my favorite books on programming patterns to date (and the patterns are not limited to game design). I would strongly recommend this as a starting point for any game dev.

Scrum is fine and dandy if you're working on a small team, but I wouldn't focus too heavily on it, especially not if you intend to work alone. Even if you're going to work on a small team, Scrum is a development lifecycle that you can learn in 6 minutes by looking at a chart. Don't worry about it.

The language of your choice is going to primarily be driven by what platform you're designing for, and what kind of game. Working on a AAA title? You're probably going to be in C++. Working on a game for Facebook? Probably going to be in Flash. Working on a game for cell phones? Probably going to be in Java. Looking to make a simple DirectX (windows only) game? Probably going to be in .NET.

As for anything else (assets / scripting / etc.) this will come with time. I would strongly recommend you start with a very, very simple do-it-yourself game (think Tetris). Even if it's a clone of another game. (But don't clone Tetris. They LOVE to sue people.) Minesweeper is always a good one to start with (being a strictly event driven game, you can whip up a fully functioning mine sweeper in an afternoon).

Then move on to another simplistic 2D game. (I feel like everyone should start by making an Arkanoid clone, though I've also helped people make simple 2D racing games and such.) Finally, move on to making something a bit more complex that would be worthy of your portfolio, without trying to jump into the next great MMO.

And who knows, maybe even one of your tech demos can make you filthy rich. (We all dream of being the next "Notch" with Minesweeper I meant "Minecraft"...)


Edit: I also left out the possibility of using a game engine for your development. Unity is popular, but there are more game engines out there than you can shake a stick at.

Personally, and this is strictly personal preference, I prefer the flexibility given by rolling my own code. Game engines can cut your development time by YEARS, but then you're forced to find, and work around any quirks or limitations the engines have (and they all have them). I find that so unbelievably frustrating to run into a wall like this that I'd rather take the extra eons to roll my own. (But then, I've never managed to release a completed commercial title, so there's that.)

So when you're talking about how to make a large scale application, you're talking about how all the different systems work together, you're talking about the engine. Now, there's no 'universal' understanding about how to make a game engine, but there are some mostly agreed upon practices about how to make a good game engine.

Probably the most important consideration from an software architecture view, is keeping your systems separate from each other to some degree. To what degree and how you keep systems separated, is largely a matter of taste and training. This is very helpful, because it limits how much of the code you have to have 'loaded into your head' when working on one thing or another.

For example, let's say you have a player object, you obviously need to draw it on the screen somehow. So you write some system to handle drawing the player to the screen. But how does the rendering system know where to draw the player? Does it have access to the player object directly? Does the player object communicate to the rendering system where it is? Or is there some go between that the renderer can use? What happens if you need to change something in the renderer, do you need to change the player object too?

A Game Engine defines what those systems are and how they 'talk' to each other.

So here's your answer beyond 'time and money'. Smart engineers figured out how to break a complex simulated world into a variety of subsystems (Physics, Weather, Time, Entities, etc), and then designed a way for these systems to communicate to one another. Once the systems have been defined, it is much simpler to have teams specialize on one aspect of the game. The team writing your rendering code, probably do not have to know that much about how animal AI works in order to draw an animal on the screen, and vice versa.

If you want to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes in a game engine, you can check out the definitive work on the topic, Game Engine Architecture. But you could actually figure out a lot on this on your own simply by thinking about the problem of separating your game systems on a code level, how do you decide where to draw the player for example, and then referring to common programming patterns to see what structures might serve that purpose. To that end Game Programming Patterns does an excellent job demoing how to structure code on a tactical level.

Yup! I have limited control over this, but I'll try to get it everywhere I can. amazon.de has it for sale now.

Game Programming Patterns

Great book. Code samples are concise, mostly in C++ but simple enough to follow without being a C++ expert. Text is so well-written I'm enjoying reading the book cover-to-cover, it flows well and the author comes across as a naturally funny person. But you don't have to read it straight through, each chapter covers one design pattern and stands on its own, with references to the other chapters.

Amazon link

"Game Engine Architecture"

http://www.amazon.com/Engine-Architecture-Second-Jason-Gregory/dp/1466560010/

and "Game Programming Patterns"

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Patterns-Robert-Nystrom/dp/0990582906/

http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

come to my mind.

The Pragmatic Programmer

Design Patterns

Game Programming Patterns

If you are looking toward application development(games or otherwise) I'd suggest looking at more practical beginning programming books, don't even worry too much about making a game yet or building complex algorithms. I've found the Head First series fairly good in the past, so maybe try out https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Java-Kathy-Sierra/dp/0596009208

Once you get your head around basic application development a bit more, I would highly suggest learning design patterns and can fully recommend the Head First book on that topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Design-Patterns-Brain-Friendly/dp/0596007124
You can follow that up with the Game specific book on patterns, https://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Patterns-Robert-Nystrom/dp/0990582906

With all of that you should have enough to start asking more pointed questions and being able to Google up useful answers and tutorials that will get you on the road to building games.

Edit: That said, if you are looking at doing to extensive AI programming, specializing in engine design or other systems type development, start looking for books on the topic that interests you most. It's pretty easy to Google up book lists on these kinds of topics, and from there you can cross reference recommendations and should be able pick out ones that will help you get started.

What kind of games? Mobile games? Browser games? Desktop/console games?

If you're into building games entirely from the scratch and have it run on desktops and mobile devices, I'd suggest trying out the SFML framework (C++). They have some nice tutorials on their GitHub Wiki

Keep in mind that those are just the basics. If you prefer some more comprehensive literature, I'd recommend the following books:
Game Coding Complete
Game Programming Patterns
Game Engine Architecture

Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom. It started as a free online book, but he got it published so it's on Amazon now.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0990582906

This may be what you're looking for. I actually have a copy myself but haven't cracked it open yet :P

I would recommend looking up the book Game Programming Patterns. Another thing that was that has helped me is how to create an finite-state-machine (FSM), with this you can manage game states and AI-states etc. Also I have heard good things about ECS (Entity-Component-System) but have yet to try it myself. Currently I am reading about how to use Lua for modding capabilites. Don't know if this was helpful or not.

Like others have said you can find tools to make games that don't require coding. However, if you want to learn how to code games, you first need to learn how to code in general. You should learn basic object-oriented principles (inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, cohesion, coupling). I'd also strongly recommend learning about design patterns. Write some simpler programs before you try to write a game. When you get to writing a game, start out with a simple game (or maybe clone a simple game you know of, like flappy bird).

Programming Tutorials:
https://www.codecademy.com/
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/
http://www.codeproject.com/
http://tutsplus.com/

Game Programming
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Patterns-Robert-Nystrom/dp/0990582906/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451859068&sr=8-1&keywords=game+programming+patterns - has lots of examples on using design patterns in game development
http://natureofcode.com/book/introduction/ - free book on coding vectors, forces, steering behaviors, and other physics stuff
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/game-programming/understanding-component-entity-systems-r3013 - a pattern you should know if you want to code games

For programming, what kind of programming is he into? Here are some cool programming books and things:

• Automate the Boring Stuff with Python This book has a lot of beginner projects that are actually useful.
  
  
• Arduino A little microprocessor that he can use to make cool projects. I'm a software engineer and I had fun playing aroung with this. Plus, you can use it for actual useful things (I'm planning on making an automatic plant waterer, but you can look online for all the awesome stuff people have made).
  
  
• Raspberry Pi Similar to the arduino but it's a full computer. For more software-heavy projects than the arduino. I'd probably recommend starting with the arduino.
  
  
• Great book about how code and computers actually work that's geared towards the "intelligent layperson" link.
  
  
• If he's already programming and wants to create games I can recommend this one.. Not good for beginners though.
  
  
• If you want to give him a well written tome about game programming here it is. Again, not really for beginners but really good for someone wanting to learn about game programming

One thing you can try to do is learn programming patterns. Patterns can help you get your head around new problems. They are ways of doing things and can be used to solve many diverse problems. This is a great book to read: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Patterns-Robert-Nystrom/dp/0990582906/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1540954964&sr=8-1&keywords=game+programming+patterns

So I mostly taught myself programming, but i have an engineering background. For context, im working now as a game developer. What i found most helpful once i became confident with my actual problem solving skills in programming was learning programming patterns.

For me that came in the form of [this book] (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0990582906/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fSt.Bb1A7WQ5E), which is really just a rehash of how the design patterns in this book can be applied to game development.

Basically once you're more familiar with design patterns, you'll be able to build more manageable code, and better understand others who are using the same patterns.

Not GML-specific but these are my two favorite game development books.

Try out this one for software architecture, wish I read it earlier
Read this to get thinking about game design

My top three books are:


https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/0123694965

https://www.amazon.com/David-Perry-Game-Design-Brainstorming/dp/1584506687

(more like an index of game design terms, ideal for brainstorming)

https://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Patterns-Robert-Nystrom/dp/0990582906

(more related to programming, but can give you a great insight how games should be structured, which can inform some design decisions)

Con le basi sono messo abbastanza bene, sono un ingegnere informatico e lavoro praticamente solo in C# sullo stack .NET .. solo che per ora ho programmato praticamente solo webapp e al massimo software piccoli desktop. Quello che mi servirebbe sarebbe una buona introduzione al ciclo di vita e all'architettura dei giochi..

stavo pensando di acquistare questo libro, sembra ottimo!

Game Programming Patterns

Game Programming Patterns - https://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Patterns-Robert-Nystrom/dp/0990582906