Personally, I consider creating a computer game to be a much more massive undertaking than filming a movie or recording a song. While both movie and songs/albums have their natural flow and aren't intended to be tampered with, creating a computer game is - a whole another ballgame. To create a virtual world that has to be unpredictably interactive is a massive undertaking and until now, all the books I had the opportunity to read didn't address that issue in one single tome.
David Perry recently released Video Game Design, a book that can be only treated as the bible of video game development. On over 1000 pages, David details how the game creation and production should be managed. It took over five years to create this book targeting students and designers, and game dev colleagues alike. The book e-tails at Amazon.com for 35 bucks - David also started a design group over at Game Design Book.
All in all, it is good to hear that projects such as these are coming to market, because we can finally see gaming industry coming of age, with manuals and bibles appearing on the process of game creation.
Dave, hats off from the BSN* team - BTW, if you're surprised by the lack of our usual sharp tone, there are things in this world that deserve our recommendation. David's book is one of those things.
