Software Engineering for Game Developers

Rating:
Summary: The professional approach
Review: This book takes a very interesting (and possibly unique) approach to game developing. It's a detailed discussion on the development of a real game (30,000 lines of code) by a small team of game developers.

The book starts with the development of a set of requirements for the game. What's the game all about, what tools are going to be used, what is the scope of the project? Indeed, what makes a good set of requirements in the first place. From there it goes to modelling the game using UML. This step helps to visualize the system that constitutes the game. Why model, how to model? From here the next step is the basic software design. What's the structure of the program going to be? Why? ?What are alternatives? Then on to the next step and the next.

This is not a description of how the play the game, this is an introductory to intermediate (maybe even advanced) book on Software Engineering. It is oriented to gaming, but it covers the basic rules of any major software project. The approach that it uses leads you through the process one step at a time, it gives you the way professional developers approach the business.