Developer's Life Part 13: More Bookshelf Clearing
By François Dominic Laramée

It's that time of year again: my bookshelves are overflowing with good stuff I have to recommend to you guys, just in time for the game industry's Great Annual Post-Christmas-Release-Crunch Sleepoff! Lots of good stuff in there, so grab a pencil, fire up your Amazon wish list, or just cajole your loved one something extra, and read on…

For Programmers
I recently picked up a copy of David Brackeen's Developing Games in Java, published by New Riders (ISBN: 1592730051), and it is a pure joy to read. This is a book that begins with a discussion of threads, so it is no lightweight fluff, but the writer's style and the copious amounts of relevant code make it easy and pleasant to work through the material. The first section, humbly titled "Java Game Fundamentals", is worth the price of the book on its own: in addition to threads, it discusses input, sound, 2D graphics, multi-player issues and a complete core architecture quite sufficient for any small web-distributed game, thus covering as much as or more relevant ground than most game programming books of recent vintage. And once you're done with it, you still have three quarters of the page count to look forward to, including 3D, optimization, scripting, game saves and sundry topics of importance.

Bottom line: I haven't finished reading the whole book yet, but I couldn't wait to talk about it. If you have any interest in multi-platform programming, or in publishing a small independent game through one of the web aggregators, or just in smart software engineering, pick up this book now. You won't regret it.

For Designers
Several months ago, the fine folks at New Riders sent me partial galleys of Chris Crawford on Game Design (ISBN: 0131460994) so I could write an inside-cover blurb for the book. (Yes, why they would want me to do that is beyond me as well.) Chris Crawford is a certifiable genius, of course, and while you may not always agree with what he has to say, he will get your wheels turning early and often.
 

In what must be a world premiere, here is a quote from that glowing blurb I wrote myself:

"[…] Chris boldly flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but never without iron-clad justification. This book is immensely thought-provoking, and also a wonderful read: You will alternate between laughing out loud and taking notes. Read it. Think furiously. Then read again."

Highly, highly recommended.

For Writers (and Designers, and Plain-Old Readers Too)
We game developers love our speculative fiction. Every year sees its fair share of horror games, a king's ransom in sci-fi titles, and a huge bloated heap of fantasy. But one speculative sub-genre that has been strangely under-exploited in games, despite its enduring popularity in print, is alternate history.

The phrase "alternate history" is pretty much self-explanatory: it is an extrapolation of what might have happened had the outcome of some historical event, whether seminal or mundane, been different from what it was in reality. A current game example is Freedom Fighters, in which America has lost the Cold War and players must defend New York City from a Soviet invasion. An interesting premise; here are a couple of alternate history books that may start you on equally engaging tracks when you design the setting for your next masterpiece:

1632, by Eric Flint (ISBN: 0671319728)
This wonderfully entertaining novel begins when an alien art experiment displaces a West Virginia coal-mining town of a few thousand to 17^th-century Germany, right in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. The book describes how the townsfolk cope with their new (and quite lethal) surroundings, rebuilding a little piece of their lost America in the distant past.

1632 is an amazing book. It breaks just about every rule of fiction writing – and yet, it is such a pure delight to read that you just won't care. Sure, the good guys are impossibly just, beautiful and smart. The bad guys, way too evil, misshapen and dumb. It becomes obvious very soon that the heroes will never be in any real danger. The amazing resourcefulness of the West Virginians, whose paltry numbers "just happen" to include an Olympic-caliber biathlete, a union leader with the skills and charisma of Abraham Lincoln, and a Vietnam veteran with an M-60 machine gun tucked away in his backyard, stretches the imagination to say the least. The running gags, like the NCAA nose tackle who scares the pants off everybody in the 17^th century because he's so big and strong (and says if he's provoked into a duel he'll fight it with 10-pound sledgehammers), run too long and too often. Doesn't matter. You will fall in love with Mike and Tom and Rebecca and Julie and the others by page 4. More importantly from a game designer's perspective, the ways in which a tiny group of Americans ends up using superior skills to cope with, and eventually dominate, a world that suddenly has become far more alien than many sci-fi galactic empires, is a powerful source of inspiration. Highly recommended.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (ISBN: 0553580078)
This book has very little in common with Flint's. Whereas 1632's events take place over a matter of months, this one covers seven hundred years. Flint's heroes are familiar; Robinson begins his story by wiping out all of Europe's population in a medieval plague, thus opening the world for Chinese and Islamic domination. And while Flint goes for campy fun, Robinson's is a much more serious, researched, literary book.

The Years of Rice and Salt isn't Robinson's best, not by a long shot. (That distinction goes to Red Mars.) The overarching pseudo-Buddhist religious premise doesn't work very well, and the book reads more like a collection of mildly related novelettes of inconsistent quality than as a coherent whole. However, the extrapolation itself is top-notch. Read to study Robinson's technique, and no matter how slow and frustrating some of the early stories may be, don't put the book away until you have read "The Alchemist", one of the five best stories I have read all year.

Silent Stars Go By by by James White (ISBN: 0345371100)
In my 33 years of life, I must have read between 750 and 1,000 novels of all styles. This one is my favorite, joining Star Control 2 on the short list of treats I revisit every year around Christmas time. Its premise: an obscure Irish monk discovers Hero's description of a steam-based toy in the Great Library of Alexandria, invents steam power, and launches the Industrial Revolution over 1,000 years ahead of schedule. As a result, the Kingdom of Hibernia (the Irish world power) launches Earth's first starship, captained by a Catholic Church cardinal, in the 14^th century.

Read this one for the breadth of the extrapolation: White's characters include all sorts of people from all sorts of cultures influenced by Hibernia and/or involved in the starship project, from Jesuit scientists to Aztec princesses and from Native American economic juggernauts to the Heir Apparent to the throne of China. Plus, the main characters, two Irish healers, are to die for. Curl up around the fireplace and enjoy.

If You're in a Hurry…
If you want a taste of alternate history but don't have a whole lot of free time, here are a couple of short stories you might enjoy:

[] Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken" (available in the Orson Scott Card anthology Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century) posits that achieving starflight is actually quite easy to do and that every sentient species in the galaxy except mankind has developed some form of faster than light propulsion during the local equivalent of the Renaissance – with interesting consequences when an alien invasion army lands in contemporary America with weapons and tactics that Frederick the Great would have laughed at.

[] And finally, in David Brin's "A Professor at Harvard," from the July/August issue of Analog, a trifling change in one man's life ends up bringing Galileo to America and speeding up scientific development by centuries; this story, like so much of Brin's other work (The Crystal Spheres and the novels of the first Uplift trilogy come to mind) will stay with you for a long, long time.

And Now, A Shameless Plug…
As you may have heard, Ubisoft and Electronic Arts' new Montreal studio have been skewering each other in Quebec courtrooms for the past couple of months over a no-compete clause in the employment contracts of several former Splinter Cell leads who wanted to jump ship.

Notwithstanding the legal merits of this particular case (which, to me, seems egregiously unfair), the very concept of a no-compete clause in an employment contract is a terrible idea for everyone: the employee, the studio, and the industry as a whole.

Now for the plug part: I will have much more to say about this in the December issue of Game Developer magazine, in the Soapbox column. Read it, and as always, comments are more than welcome.

See you next issue!

BIO
If you aren't really tired of FDL by now, don't say so in public unless you are looking for a serious beating. He's been the bane of the game industry for over 10 years, during which he cajoled and threatened his way into over 20 credits as designer, producer, programmer and writer. For some reason, magazine and book editors seem to like him; his Game Design Perspectives and Secrets of the Game Business are available now from Charles River Media. With the dozens of articles he has contributed to other industry publications and the roundtables he hosts at GDC every year, it is getting really hard to avoid him these days. But there is hope; FDL has been freelancing for 5 years, so we expect him to starve to death any day now. Visit his mediocre web site, http://pages.infinit.net/idjy, at your own risk.