Tag: games

Nate Kenyon “Spectres”

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spectres

This time, I’ll start from a bit farther back — why a book from the StarCraft series in the first place.

The term “novelization” for games refers to a fictional work created based on a video game. I never used to think novelizations could be interesting, even though it’s a very popular and widespread genre.

However, I once became so fascinated with the StarCraft universe that I couldn’t resist when I saw the first novelizations based on it. At that time, they weren’t available in Russian, so I bought the original English versions, hoping that someday I would be able to read them. When I opened the first page of the first book — Liberty’s Crusade — an even crazier idea struck me: to translate it into Russian. I spent almost two years working on the translation, but I finished it. Moreover, it was published by the Azbuka publishing house, and it became the first book from this universe available in Russian.

Looking back, I now feel a bit embarrassed by this amateur translation, with its fair share of mistakes, and the publisher’s editor added some of their own content without consulting me. However, this project gave me a huge boost in learning English, and after that, reading books in the original language didn’t seem so difficult.

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Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series

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I just started Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy by Telltale. I can’t say much about the story yet since I’ve only played for about 15 minutes, but the character designs… I’ve never seen the original comics and only know the characters from the two movies. So, naturally, I’m comparing the game to those movie versions. I don’t know why they chose not to replicate the cinematic appearances, but visually, almost all of them fall VERY short compared to the beloved movie versions. Maybe except for Groot and Rocket, who don’t look that different—it would be hard to mess them up. What bothers me the most is Drax—he’s so “flat” and unmemorable. It’s unclear why they didn’t just go with the movie designs. I assume it was too expensive (though in Game of Thrones, they managed to closely mirror the TV actors). I’ll probably keep playing the game, but there’s definitely some disappointment from unmet expectations.

Scott Rogers “Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design”

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Although I have worked in the video game industry for years, I never thought I was any kind of a game designer. But it is impossible to avoid all this knowledge after all these years, especially if you have a lot of great professionals around you. This is why you want to know more about a big part of your job and entire life.

One of my colleagues recommended me to read ‘Level Up!’ as one of the best ‘manuals’ of game design.

The book isn’t just a game design tutorial, it is a great handbook. The author explains every type of aspect of game creation, and give a lot of examples of how to document it and keep ideas.

One can say that it most likely too boring to read a step-by-step manual, but there is so much humour and dozens of great artwork, created by the author himself in a very ironic and even cartoonish style. This makes the book easy to read, almost like a comic graphic novel.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in game design. And if it is a part of your job then you have to have it, the book is like a Bible for every game designer (in the words of my colleagues, game designers).