Over the holidays a new game development book Game Tool Gems was released. It is somewhat unique being focused on creating game tools, a subject I actually really enjoy that isn’t often covered. The publishers description:
Game developers love what they do because of whizzy graphics and clever technical ideas, but creating games boils down to one hard reality we all know and hate to admit: the entire process depends on the robustness of the game tools pipeline. This book is all about that pipeline and the tools that support it. And that simply means one thing: if you’re a game developer, you must have it. Written by developers and researchers, the book offers tips and tricks relating to asset and data management, geometry and models, Web tools, and programming.
The table of contents:
Asset and Data Management
- Plug-in based Asset Compiler Architecture
- Where is it? GFX Asset Data Management
Geometry and Models
- 3D Format Conversion (FBX, COLLADA)
- Building Procedural Geometry using MAXSCRIPT
- A Uniform Geometry Workflow for Animated Feature Films
- Rock Solid Content Pipeline with the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite
- Rendering COLLADA Assets on Mac OS X with Scene Kit
- COLLADA Exporter for Unity Developers in the Unity Asset Store
Web Tools
- Creating Web-based Tools with Django
- Introduction to Utilizing HTML, CSS and JavaScript to Create Rich Debugging Information
- Moving Tools to the Cloud: Control, Configure, Monitor and View Your Game with WebSocket
Programming
- Decoupling Game Tool GUIs from Core Editing Operations
- Do-it-yourself Game Prototyping Tool for Mobile Devices
- Engineering Domain-Specific Languages for Games
A wide variety of subjects covered. Over-all the book is fairly short at approximately 250 pages. There is a fairly large amount of preview available on Amazon if the above topics sound interesting to you. No reviews are available as of yet. If you pick up this book, let us know what you think.
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