Brent is an insightful game designer and this chapter is an exerpt from one of his longer books covering a wider array of topics than scripting alone. If your interest in game development is broader than just scripting, though, I would suggest getting the full-length Lazy Designer books instead, as one of those includes the full text of this scripting chapter.



This chapter introduces an overview of the basics of what a scripting language is, what you can do with one, and some good advice on valuable practices to use while scripting to make games. I am not a game developer, but I do a lot of scripting-type coding using visual basic for applications and, my own experience has a lot of parallels with the topic. I found myself agreeing emphatically with much of the advice given: particularly with respect to use of functions, guidelines/naming conventions, and testing early-and-often.



I have never previously encountered a visual scripting language and this section was a bit harder to follow without being hands-on with the software myself. Which is entirely my own fault because Brent provides the source to get the free software to use! Speaking of which, Brent provides lots of additional reference links throughout the chapter for most topics that he provides an overview of in case the reader wants to learn more.



My only 'disappointment' is that I wish there was a bit more depth given on some of the topics that I am less familiar with. A bit more grounding in object oriented programming would have been nice. And I couldn't help but wish for more explanation of the structure of the syntax used in the example NWN languages, or C#. And I would have loved to have seen a fully developed set of scripting guidelines used by someone like Bioware. But that criticism is somewhat unjust given that this is not a book about scripting, it is a chapter about scripting from a book with a much broader scope. It may even be that the subject is a bit more approachable for beginners because of it. Given that, Brent condenses a lot of useful detail into the chapter and is well worth the read.