Want to be a video game developer? This book may help. A review of Jagged Alliance 2.
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Welcome to Burning Books. I’m Caleb, and I want to help you love video games even more. I do that with editorials about video games, funny skits about video games, and reviews that tend to highlight items that help support what makes games so great. For example, this video, part of my ongoing series where I review all of the books from the Boss Fight Books catalog. Today’s review is of Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi, a game I’ve never played by an author I’ve never heard of. But as you’ll find out, this book scratches a very particular itch and may scratch that same itch if you have it. Stay tuned.
This is the seventh Boss Fights Books release I’ve reviewed, and it just dawned on me today that I’ve never given a proper description of the subject game. I dive right into the book and that’s doing a disservice to you, readers like me who may not be familiar with the game. So let me correct that.
Jagged Alliance 2 is a tactical role-playing game (trpg) released for the personal computer (pc) that puts players in the control of a group of killers from the Association of International Mercenaries (AIM) in order to take back control of a fictional country. I’m personally not a fan of trpgs so when presented with a book about one–had I not committed to reviewing all of the Boss Fight Books releases (bfbrs)–I would normally have said to the person presenting the book FU (find others…others begins with U right?).
Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi begins as a straightforward archive of the history of Jagged Alliance 2, starting with a rather longer than expected exploration of the history of the first Jagged Alliance game and of the developers themselves, a family operation known as Sir-Tech.
When I become bored with a piece of nonfiction, I tend to find myself mining the author’s life for clues to help me better understand his or her approach. This better understanding often allows me to see the book through an alternate lens which can bring me around to reinvesting in, and ultimately liking, the book. Take Blood, Sweat, and Pixels for example. A book detailing the hard life of overworked game developers. Cool. Knowing that the author is the news editor at Kotaku, a leading website covering the industry and culture of video games, extra cool. I know I’ll get a good story because the right questions will have been asked of the subjects.
With Jagged Alliance 2, I found myself veering into the personality of the author within the first 10 pages. This, is a bad sign. But, it turns out this author’s life is one I secretly want. He’s a programmer, but it’s his game development life I want. Now, I know it seems weird to say I want to be a game developer after just revealing I read a book about the hard life of overworked game developers…but do keep in mind, I’m an idiot.
Kazemi’s programming background allowed me to forgive the overly linear, point-by-point approach of the first half of this book because I saw it as a reflection of the logic that occupies his mind. And with that, I fell into the book. I better appreciated Sir-Tech’s history, the comments from the developers, the discussion of game layers that were used to organize core mechanics of the game. This appreciation was heightened further when Kazemi mentioned some unique inclusions in the game’s source code. The source code contained a full essay describing the philosophy behind the game’s artificial intelligence.
“The most fundamental part of the strategic AI which takes from reality and gives to gameplay is the manner the queen attempts to take her towns back…As the player takes more mines over, the queen will focus more on quality and defense. In the beginning of the game, she will focus more on offense than mid-game or end-game. “(pg 93)
This level of documentation in the source code is not something I–especially with only my armchair developer knowledge–would have considered practical. But the way the developer presented the information actually makes a lot of sense. He was anticipating other developers looking at his code, and rather than just define every mathematical equation that went into the AI, the developer appended that with a more natural description, thus allowing any developers potentially confused by his math the ability to know what he was aiming for so they can come up with their own math.
I mean, I really get it. It’s like when I was programming the enemy ships to shoot at the player ship in my seminal top down, titled camera, implied narrative cultural touchstone game Science Class Sucks, I knew future game developers–or possibly future historians mining my life for the roots of my genius–might not understand the complex way I recorded “pew pew” sounds in my microphone to give the game a proper sense of verisimilitude. That worry still keeps me up at night. I’m tortured.
Kazemi’s book also spends a lot of time on defending Jagged Alliance 2 as a game that was much more complex and perhaps more potentially impressive than many of its contemporaries including the X-COM series. As I have no familiarity with that series, I cannot argue the claim. But that’s what makes a book like this important. If we can trust the knowledge of the author, then we should also trust his opinions. A lesson a lot of us can apply to our daily lives (I’m speaking mostly to the climate science deniers our there…or the any kind of science deniers).
For fans of the Jagged Alliance series, this book is probably a must read. Again, I’ve never heard of the series prior to reading this book, so I can’t say how much of the information would support your love of the game. For armchair game developers, this book offers a few very interesting glimpses into the day-to-day process of creating a game. And if you enjoy that angle of narrative, I definitely recommend Blood, Sweat, and Pixels as well. In fact, Jagged Alliance 2 could very well have fit along with the chapters of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.
Tell me in the comments below your thoughts on Jagged Alliance 2, the game or the book. Does reading a book detailing the development process of a game take away the fun or does it add to the experience?
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Thank you for watching.
Mentioned
- Darius Kazemi
- Boss Fight Books
- Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi
- Jagged Alliance 2 source code (on GitHub)
The following are YouTube videos licensed under CC BY 3.0
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
