I want to become a video game designer can someone name any books that I can buy to help me with my drawing?

Answer 1

that's cool. You could just get like Maya or some other program instead.

Answer 2

It kind of depends on what type of drawing skills you have now. I would search for books that deal with digital graphic design and game design. You might even search for interviews with game designers and see if they offer any insights.

Also, I think their is a game design magazine;

Game Developer Magazine. http://www.gdmag.com/homepage.htm

Give that a try & see if it's any help.

Good Luck!

Answer 3

I'm also trying to get into designing video games. I have 2D artistic skills, but its a whole different animal trying to create 3D art work.

Technically your 2D drawing skills can help, but for the most part won't matter much when creating 3D characters and elements for your game. You have to learn how to think in three dimentional terms and recognize values for depth and spacing. The things you learn about lighting, shadow, and foreshortening in 2D art have little use in 3D modeling since foreshortening is automatically handled by the camera position and virtual lights will generate the proper highlights and shadows.

If you really want to get into designing video games you'll have to study up on a lot of different things. Here's the things I recommend you do (it's what I'm doing) until you can get into a formal course:

1) Learn about C++ and OpenGL programming. You need to know how to write the code that will make your progam.

2) Brush up on your mathmatics, particularly Geometry and Trigonometry for 3D modeling and animation. In order to create realistic 3D interactions within the game environment you need to be familiar with calulating tragectory angles and object volumes.

3) Learn a 2D art program (Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc.) if you haven't done so already. You'll need to manipulate and tweak various 2D images that will act as textures and surfaces for your 3D objects.

4) Learn a 3D animation program. These are what you'll be using to creat your charaters, objects, and environments. Lil_Viet_Soja already mentioned Maya, but there are several different programs including Lightwave 3D, which is what I'm trying to learn. You'll need a computer with the right capabilities to run these programs and they're not cheap. Even if you can't get the computer and program for 3D animation you can still go to www.newtek.com to learn more. This is Lightwave's main site and most of it revolves around using that specific program, but the site has several dozen tutorials (written & video) that will at least get you familiar with various concepts for 3D modeling and animation. Even if you don't choose Lightwave as your 3D animation, many of the common principles of 3D animation in these tutorials can be applied to similar programs like Maya.

I'm trying to save up money so I can get into a Game Design course (like Devry PowerUp) you may want to save up for a similar course. The one's I've come across offer a comprehensive series of courses that cover 3D Animation and code programming, but I haven't been in school for a while so I've been trying to brush up on what I can and learn stuff before I take the course that way there's less chance I'll be in over my head and waste money flunking out.

The site Bionicbook worm recommeded appears useful for game programming. But you might also want to check these programming sites out in addition to the site (newtek) I gave earlier, to get more familiar with the programming aspect. Even if you don't have a C++ compiler program, you can still read through the various tutorials to learn about coding. There ar emore of course, but these are just the one's I've been to.

www.acm.org (introduction to C++)
www.Troubleshooters.com (C & C++ coding)
www.CProgramming.com (C++ tutorials)
www.CPPGamePrograming (C++ game programming)
www.ProgrammingTutorials.com (Multiple Program Languages)
www.EDM2.com (C++ Tutorials)