Finished two books,
Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI by Dave Mark (2009), a very easy read and rather superficial. I don't remember how I encountered it, probably some thread about how terrible Yandere Dev is. It completely omits path-finding and the author gets a bit too obsessed with randomness in the end IMHO, but it's an OK book for absolute noobs (Yandere Dev would surely benefit). It lead me to another book published by the same company,
Video Game Design Revealed by Guy W. Lecky-Thompson (2008) and that book is, well… something else.
The author claims Smash TV introduced dual-stick controls in top-down shooters, even though Robotron already had implemented that years earlier. The author mentions Crazy Taxi (written Crazi Taxi) in the same sentence with GTA as an example of violent games. The author claims Mario Sunshine to be the first 3D Mario and classifies it as a
puzzle game. The author claims that the release of the Sony PSP "prompted Nintendo to combine the GameBoy Advance and GameCube into a similar kind of gaming system" and he means the Nintendo DS by that. The author seems to believes that the original Doom used polygons and that CryTek invented variable level of detail in polygon models (and he calls Far Cry "Cry Freedom") and he says
bump mapping is when you recycle a monochrome texture by mixing in different colors to represent sand and asphalt. The author says that in Doom episode is the term for a level, that modern shmups use momentum in their control schemes, that the d-pad came about with the 16-bit generation, and that R-Type got 2D
top-down scrolling. This thing is so terrible I'm going tinfoil mode: Was that on purpose?
Here's a representative excerpt:
<There may not actually be an on-screen character. Puzzle games such as Tetris do not actually have a lead character or even enemies. The idea is to beat the machine, which becomes the “enemy.” The blocks falling from the top of the screen, and which need to be arranged in order to complete lines and thus win points, can be seen as enemies or heroes—you can be either with them or against them, depending on your point of view. Puzzle games rely on a recognizable screen layout, the game environment, and its dynamics to achieve success.The author likes above paragraph so much that he reminds you of it later in the book, and by later I mean literally t
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