Swipe This!: The Guide to Great Touchscreen Game Design by Scott Rogers

Swipe This!: The Guide to Great Touchscreen Game Design Reviews

• 
  Martin

  I will probably relegate this to the status of most of my other tech books: more reference than anything else. It's good though, and deserving of more effort than I ultimately gave it. (Though, for the moment at least, it will have one of the spaces within reaching distance on the top of my desk.) I probably did actually "read" about 70% of it, and skimmed the rest (before leading a book club style discussion of it) last month.
  
  If the book does have a fault, I felt like it wasn't giving enough credit to the creativity (in UI as well as game design) driving a lot of successful mobile games. It felt like it was advocating sticking with tried and true design principals when those principals have been around for so few years to be relatively meaningless. Especially when there are so many counter examples readily available.
• 
  Jake Forbes

  I recently heard Scott Rogers speak on the topic of "Everything I learned about level design I learned from Disneyland." As a speaker, Rogers was quite inspiring and convincing. His most recent book fails to inspire or convince. Swipe This attempts to cover the topic of designing games for touch screen devices from concept through live support. More often than not, it documents memes and ludemes with copious pop-culture doodles. It's a very shallow survey that ultimately takes his punny title to literally. Swipe This seems geared to train its reader to copy the many examples in the book than it does to inspire original games.
• 
  Robert Ling

  Yet another invaluable book on game design. This is by far the best go-to book on mobile development on the market. There is a great deal of fresh thinking and perspective on design as a whole in this one as well. This is a must have book for any game developer's desk, right next to Level Up!
• 
  Lương Nguyễn

  marked it as to-read