Developing Serious Games (Charles River Media Game Development) (Paperback)

It does give an introduction into the development process of (serious) games, technologies and (project) management and business aspects. I could care less for this part and on a occasion or two I found the book (in my opinion) wrong. For example the game development process is being described as a 'pipeline' process, thus being linear. However good games, serious or not, need to be tested and tested and tested by players and thus redesigned and redesigned and redesigned many times. You can not do that in a linear managed project! I have never seen it work in practice! This is what happens if a museum, institute or school wants to make a serious game and does it in a linear way: they have an idea, they design the game, they make it and then when almost all the money is gone, they have it tested by some kids only to find out it is a boring game and needs to be redone all over. They did manage their money well throughout all the fases, but they never realised they needed to go trough the idea and design fase up to 10 times! For this reason and others the use of MS projects as proposed in the book is a bad suggestion. For (serious) game development use iterative project processes!

Another part of the book is about the hardware and software you could use to make a serious game. The suggestions on software and the lists of examples is very good (even though there is lots more software available to make (serious) games. E.g. have a look at www.gamesmaken.startpagina.nl). The remarks on hardware, could be left out. It lists what kind of PC configuration you would need to make a serious game. Ok if you are a total beginner in this field, but for the 98% of the other readers it does not make much sense. This list will be outdated at the time the book has left the presses. Also, there is so much debate on which hardware to use. The book for example suggests a pc configuration for sound recording. Now, I do not want to get into the Mac- PC discussions, but all the people I know (and I have a lot of musicians as friends) use Macs for audio recording with protocols or logic or on a occasion Steinberg software. The same goes for graphics design. The book suggest a Alienware or Dell to work on. But all the professional designers I know (more than 50 I estimate) work on Macs. So the solutions mentioned in the book are not wrong, but well... you know it is too personal. I would not even write about it in a book.

But ok, besides these two issues mentioned above, I think the info in the book is very good.

What I personally was looking for the most is how to really do it. How to make a good game for education, how to make a good game for a museum or how to make a game that convinces kids to eat healthy or not to start smoking. Design issues like these are introduced and discussed in this book, but not enough in my opinion. It would have made this book superb instead of very good if the writer had done that. Just maybe analyse two or three serious games that turned out to be working very well. How they were made, which design choices were made, how the result was measured, which dead ends were tried before they had the final result, how do the players respond to the game, etcetera. But then again, this might be a great subject for the next book on serious games!