Game Design: harder than tutorials make it appear

I haven’t posted in about a month, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy! I recently bought another monitor and can’t believe how I worked without it. The more programming I do, the more it seems necessary. Getting Visual C# Express from Microsoft has been fun as well integrating it with Unity and other projects.

I am starting to migrate to programming in C# because it seems more of a robust language to work with. I will write code in C# from here on out when I post anything Unity related. This post is about Game design though - enough blabbing.

Learning about Unity3D and all of the different types of things it can do is fantastic. The real problem I have been having is trying to create a game system that puts everything together and manages it. There is so much stuff going on: character states and events, music, collisions, inputs, memory management, GUI windows and panels, AI, etc.

I thought the best place to learn would be getting a regular game programming book that has a focus on game architecture and how to seperate and manage all of the processes going on. I knew it wouldn’t be written for Unity3d, but the basic concepts and principles would be transferrable.

Game Programming book

I picked up a copy of Game Coding Complete over the holdays and started trudging through it. It is written with C++, so some things it talks about are irrelevant if you code with C#.  The first part of the book doesn’t have much coding, but a lot of patterns and principles when putting together games. Just what I wanted. It goes into a lot of depth about organizing projects and how to seperate your code and assets using versioning tools.

I am still at an early stage of it, so I can’t say exactly how much it will help.

Has anyone read any good books for C# programmers that help learn game programming concepts and data structures? I was thinking about getting an XNA programming book, since it is another game engine that uses C#.