Game Development Essentials: Game Simulation Development

This book taught me that Super Mario World is not a plumbing simulation so much as a turtle-stomping simulation. The life lesson here is that you will get lots of points and extra lives if you stomp on a turtle and kick its shell into other turtles.

This showed up late, and there was like sand in the shrink wrap or something? I almost wonder if I technically got some bootlegged copy from the Middle East. It still worked for the intents and purposes of the class I got it for though.

great book

Book arrived in excellent condition and there were no issues with shipping.The book covers terms and helps a developer understand the corporate back end of what the game world encompasses.

Love this book. Some of the best money I have paid for a book in a long time.

nice book in great shape for student, looking forward to learning and gaining the skills that are set forth in this textbook.

This book is well written. It is thoughtful. However, after finishing this book, I find the title somewhat misleading. The book focuses far more on the variety of game simulation types and their uses, and coming up with a concept for a game simulation, far more than actually putting the process to work. I would think a title like "Game Simulations and Concept Development" would be a more accurate title. If you think of this book as trying to give its reader a direction on what type of simulation to base their own creation off of, it comes across as a success. The book takes pains to point how during the conception of the simulation, one has to decide whether to make it more like a game or more like a serious simulation, such as for training surgeons.Overall I found it educational in terms of history and rediscovering the various types of simulations that exist, but I found it too basic for my tastes.The book starts out with a section on the history of simulations and how they have become more complex with more and more variables, artificial intelligence and the like, then goes on to describe the audience of simulations, or the who would use them and why. The main 70% of the book covers various simulation categories, such as education, business, military, sports, creative arts, and sandbox-style sims. Interspersed amidst the chapters are quotes and viewpoints from industry insiders. This seems to be one of the hallmarks of the Game Development Essential series, and a welcome one. I found these comments to be the primary sources of insight on game development; unfortunately there was not much insight inside the actual text aside from the tidbits about artificial intelligence pathing. The book concludes with some views on where the future of simulations will lead, which I did actually find insightful.In short, perhaps I am setting the bar too high for what this book was intended to teach. As a basic overview and idea book, Game Simulation Development succeeds pretty well, but if you're looking for coding ideas, development process guides, etc., you might need to find a higher level book.

This books' structure does a great job at making you think actively about game and simulation, what makes them tick, which simulation strategies are successful or a turndown and why so, etc. It offers an indepht view of the genre through a thorough classification, experts comments and quotes, tips and useful case studies. Finally, it describes nicely past, present and future trends along with technology bottlenecks.A must have for training managers and learning system developper...