Game Art Elements F/X & Design [With CD-ROM]

Whenever I am contemplating a new game development book the first thing I look at is the copyright year. Software books become obsolete so quickly but..... You don't have to do that with this one. This is not about coupling up with the latest software and understanding how to make game graphics. This is about understanding the principles behind graphics for games. and that means it is very relevant. It teaches how to create, manage, and manipulate textures and tiles and how to create seamless tiling. Lots of other stuff too including a nice, but short, tutorial on how to use the genesis 3d game engine to create a game. Very useful tutorial. The genesis 3d engine is open software and a copy of it comes on the CD with the book. This alone is nice because you can take this book and actually make a game. Everything is right there including software, tutorial and sample textures. Perfect book for the person looking to make a 3d dungeon type game but has never tried to make a game before. I found the tutorials easy to follow except that it uses Photoshop and if you are a starving game maker like me you probably can't afford photoshop so you will have to work through your own translation into your paint program. I use Paint Shop Pro which is superb and about 1/10 the cost of photoshop. All in all it is a great book to teach you some fundamentals of game art and I refer to it over and over.

I picked this book up without much research. After a quick flip through the pages I decided it was better to have around than no reference material at all. Strong points: Luke Ahearn goes through a step-by-step process regarding building texture libraries, and efficient ways to structure your directory trees for referencing. These are all valid lessons that apply directly to working in a professional environment, so pay attention! Also, his feedback on tiling and cleaning up of digital images is relevant, although not comprehensive. As far as the other game art tips included, I haven't tried them yet. I use a different mapping engine (Quake 3 / GTK Radiant) but the tips and interfaces between many engines are similar, so if you don't have a commercially supported editor, I assume Wild Tangent's Genesis 3D one is adequate (it's really designed for web-based 3D gaming, and doesn't require 3D cards for all applications). At any rate, this book is not the end-all-be-all of game art and level design books, but rather a very good place to start. Weak points: The author puts a lot of information into the book without focusing on any one particular area. Perhaps that is due to the nature of the work. Be a good 2D artist and make textures. Be a good 3D artist and make models. Be a good level designer and put everything together. It's a lot to handle, and a lot of it is crammed into the book but no one area is really focused on entirely. Also, if you're not using Photoshop for texturing, have fun adapting these lessons to another application. Given Mr. Ahearn's professional experience (he did the level work and artwork for America's Army: Operations - the free 1st person shooter released by the US Army powered by the Unreal engine) it's safe to say he knows what he's doing. Don't purchase this book thinking it'll be the only tome you need to read to become a fantastic 3D artist or level artist, but consider it if you want to have a handy reference manual on how to make effective textures and intriguing levels for your games. Since modern day games can get very complex very quickly (bot pathfinding and logic, creating shaders and sky boxes, etc.) it's good to start with the essentials and build up from there. There aren't a lot of books out there that cover this type of work, so my suggestion is pick it up, work through it, and hit some message boards to learn how to do the tricky stuff.

Personally, I like the book a lot. I've completed through chapter 4 and have gone through all of the tutorials so far. I find it to be an excellent intro into what it takes to create textures for games. I also like the fact that with the tutorials you can go on to explore each one and add your own touches and creativity so that, by the end, you have really created a piece of your own artwork and just aren't following a step-by-step tutorial where your image looks just like the one in the book. The author encourages you to add your own creative touches to each project and you end up with your own piece of art instead of just a copy of someone elses. This is one of the very few tutorial books where I am actually going through each and every tutorial. They are very fun projects to do. And I've learned so many cool little tips and tricks to add to my list of texturing tricks that I feel the tutorials are worth those alone.And for someone like me that wants to be a game artist and has no other exposure to learn how to actually apply textures in a game level, I think the second half of the book will be very valuable to learn that. Even if it is not a "popular" game engine, I would imagine the principles would apply to any game engine out there.