When Development Is the Game

In the spring of 2015, the future of No Time To Play was in doubt for several reasons. One way to save what I could was to make a book of the blog. In over 100 pages, 20K words and 16 illustrations, it condenses some of the best material that had accumulated there since 2010. You can buy it from Gumroad, but the original articles are still here, too.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements

Part 1: General Advice

• Walk before you run (revised)
• Top three myths about game design
• Design by elimination (exclusive chapter)

Part 2: Choosing Your Genre

• A look at card games
• Musings on browser-based MMO games
• A database-driven engine for strategy games
• My love-hate relationship with roguelikes (expanded)
• The game that had no genre

Part 3: Choosing Graphics Technology

• In Two Point Five Dimensions (revised and expanded)
• Fun with voxels (revised)
• What about vector graphics? (exclusive chapter)
• Voxels, revisited (new chapter)
• The Art of ASCII (exclusive chapter)
• GUI toolkits and videogames

Part 4: Choosing Your Language

• Java for games, pros and cons
• Top five myths about C++
• The Bad and Good of Python
• CoffeeScript as a domain-specific language for interactive fiction
• Code versus data: a battle for the ages

Appendices

• Secrets of a successful programmer
• Image preloader in HTML5

Last but not least, the awesome cover you see above was made by my good friend Justin Reid.