Shaun McClure has just released a new book titled How to design adventure games. You can buy it online at Amazon UK or search by title or author on Amazon in other countries. It’s currently on special for £8.99 (paperback) or £2.99 (Kindle). I bought the Kindle version from Amazon Australia for instant delivery.
First impressions are very positive. Shaun emphasises that this is a book about design, not coding, so it’s appropriate to many different authoring systems. It covers the initial ideas, the story, the different types of game, creating a map, room descriptions, objects, puzzles, NPCs and so on. There’s also a chapter on testing and a final chapter on hints and tips by eight industry professionals.
The book is 200 pages chock full of illustrations and also includes data (not code) for a sample game.
Having looked at the Amazon preview of the book and the downloadable files, it appears as though one of the files is missing: the “Help Responses” document is duplicated as the “Examine and Search Responses” document.
I would also like to point out that Kindle for PC does not load the link to access those documents correctly (it is missing a hyphen that I added manually).
@morgan and @strawberryfield, I’ve confirmed your observations and sent Shaun an email. Hopefully, he can fix these.
EDIT: Well, that was quick. He’s corrected them already. Not sure about the Kindle version. If that’s fixed, you will probably need to download it again from your Kindle device. The Examine and Search Responses.docx can now be downloaded from the Wix web site.
Seems interesting, just the thing I need. So I bought the Kindle edition. But it seems it doesn’t support Kindle Whitepaper ebook-readers - I would have preferred that over my phone
