An Architectural Approach to Level Design: Second edition

This book does a pretty good job of raising one's awareness of many of the different factors that go into making a level feel good and play well.I've worked in the game industry and also as a hobbyist, but my primary background is as a programmer. I like to generalize though, both because I want to do more solo dev sometime and also because I want to be able to understand and communicate with the other disciplines better. This book seems like it will work fairly well for that.However, the book does have some flaws. The author often has a bad sense for terminology, both in terms of how he uses existing terms and for those he makes up. Some of his uses of terminology are confused or even outright wrong.For example, his use of "steiner point" to mean a shortcut or a one-directional edge (like in graph theory for an edge) shows no indication of actually understanding what the term means. I know quite a bit of math and steiner point definitely doesn't mean that. There are other similar cases of this kind of thing in the book too.In contrast, for an example of simply having terrible tastes in terminology (but not being wrong): Instead of saying "landmark" or "point of interest" for something that draws people's attention, he calls them "architectural weenies" (a reference to a Disney animal movie production trick). This is an very lame choice. There are other similar examples of terms chosen in bad taste too, like his "Nintendo Power" method term for labeling maps etc.He also sometimes conflates multiple different things and then labels those things with one word or phrase, in a non-rigorous way that clearly misses the mark. Additionally, quite a few of the things he covers have strong redundancies and overlaps. The concepts and terminology he uses could definitely be significantly improved and clarified and made more rigorous. There are actually many opportunities to more strongly factor out the underlying principles in play that are unfortunately overlooked by the author. It could also be less wordy.All that being said though, this is a great book for learning the basic principles of level design, so don't let all this deter you too much. Just realize that if you come from a technical background (like me), you may sometimes find yourself mentally cringing at some of his terminology choices, vague/circular/meaningless explanations, etc. You'll need to read between the lines and mentally filter against his sometimes poor terminology use.I haven't read the 1st edition, but this version is probably superior since it contains some extra content such as interviews from other people.Oh, and there were a few typos I noticed too, e.g. "plyer" instead of "player" (if my memory is correct) and some others.All in all though, it was a good read and I'd recommend it for people interested in level design.[This review was written on 2019-07-05 and may eventually become outdated, so keep that in mind.]

Nice book but with terrible packing.It made a shipping crease on the book cover.So that’s not worth a brand new price for me.

The book has a lot of examples making it very easy to understand more complex problems and is overall a good starting point for anybody interested in level design.

Get through chapter 1, it's a little dull. But the rest of it is fantastic.Well written, well explained with great examples, and great exercises to really understand how you can implement the concepts it covers.Worth every penny.

L’abbiamo regalato ad un’amica esperta nel settore ed è stato apprezzatissimo