Appendix A: Resources

(Updated 2025-02-21.)

For personal reference. Compilation in progress. These categories are grouped in a way that makes sense to me.

Animation

  • Animator Guild. Getting Started in 2D Animation. Video course that I can’t recommend highly enough, by Howard Wimshurst.
  • Ellen Besen, illus. Bryce Hallett. Animation Unleashed.
  • Aaron Blaise. Various video workshops.
  • Preston Blair. Cartoon Animation with Preston Blair and Advanced Animation.
  • Eric Goldberg. Character Animation Crash Course!
  • Ed Hooks. Acting for Animators, 4th ed.
  • Alec Longstreth. His five-day workshop on an Introduction to Hand-Drawn Animation via the Center for Cartoon Studies (2020, remote) gave me the kick in the pants I needed to get started! (I don’t think the workshop is currently offered, but if it ever shows up again, I recommend it highly!)
  • Tony White. How to Make an Animated Film.
  • Richard Williams. The Animator’s Survival Kit.

Art, Cartooning, Comics, and Sequential Art

  • Kenneth Anderson, Devon Cady-Lee, Cécile Carre, and Hollie Mengert. Creating Characters for the Entertainment Industry: Character Design for Animation, Illustration and Video Game.
  • Molly Bang. Picture This: How Pictures Work.
  • Noah Bradley. Paint Figures Better.
  • Jason Brubaker. I had the fortune to take his course on making comics. I learned so much about the medium from him.
  • Frank Cho. Drawing Beautiful Women: The Frank Cho Method.
  • Jim Dunavent. How to Draw Airplanes.
  • Alphonso Dunn. Pen and Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide. The workbook for this is great too.
  • Margaret Fletcher. Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide.
  • Patrick J. Jones. The Anatomy of Style. His workshop was a game-changer for me, although I was definitely the remedial student in that crowd!
  • Paul Karasik. I took his five-day graphic novel workshop (remote) via the Center for Cartoon Studies, which was an amazing experience. I’ll never look at Nancy the same way again!
  • Shigenobu Kobayashi, Colorist: A Practical Handbook for Personal and Professional Use.
  • Erika Lancaster. Her one-on-one video art lessons, which I took for a year, gave me a much-needed foundation. She’s a great instructor and excels at teaching fundamentals.
  • Line of Action for gesture drawing practice.
  • Pratima Pinnepalli. Terrific zines, art, comics; she’s running a zine/comic workshop series at my local public library!
  • Scott Robertson with Thomas Bertling. How to Draw. 
  • Brenda Robson. Art Synectics.
  • Nicholas Roukes. Art Synectics.
  • Sungsook Hong Setton. The Spirit of the Brush: Chinese Brush Painting Techniques: Simplicity, Spirit, and Personal Journey.
  • Attabeira German de Turowski. The Art of One-Line Drawing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Beautiful Continuous Line Drawings.

Cinematography and Storyboarding

  • Patti Bellantoni. If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling.
  • Joseph V. Mascelli. The Five C’s of Cinematography.
  • Woody Woodman. Storyboarding with Woody Woodman (paid video course).

Crafts

(Yes, crafts are arts, but for ease of personal reference.)

  • Peter Saydak. Everyone Can Learn Origami.

Creativity and Motivation

  • Rich Armstrong. The Perfect 100 Day Project.
  • Twyla Tharp. The Creative Habit. Life-changingly good.

Fashion

  • Hannah Kane. The Style Thesaurus.
  • Amy Miller. Dressed to Kill: British Naval Uniform, Masculinity and Contemporary Fashions, 1748-1857.
  • Fashionpedia: The Visual Dictionary of Fashion Design.

Game Coding and Development: General

  • Matt Hackett. How to Make a Video Game by Yourself: 10 Steps, Just You and a Computer.
  • Robert Nystrom. Game Programming Patterns.
  • Daniele Penazzo. 2D Game Development: From Zero to Hero, Pseudocode Edition. This is 600+ pages but it turns out this is intended to be pretty comprehensive as a self-study text, starting with math preliminaries and including a primer on audio sampling rates and DAWs. Genuinely terrific, but it’s likely that any given person will be able to skim or skip entire sections, depending on their background!

Game Coding and Development: Unity

  • Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jon Manning, and Tim Nugent. Unity Development Cookbook: Real-Time Solutions from Game Development to AI.
  • Casey Hardman. Game Programming with Unity and C++: A Complete Beginner’s Guide, 2nd ed.
  • Joseph Hocking. Unity in Action: Multiplatform Game Development in C#, 3rd ed.

Game Design

  • Avery Alder. Designing Games That Matter (resources; I have not attended this workshop).
  • Sam Kabo Ashwell. A Bestiary of Player Agency. An examination and taxonomy of patterns in branching narrative.
  • Gabe Barrett. Find the Fun: How to Go from Idea to Published Game. Note: focuses on tabletop games. Also Board Game Design Lab: Prototypes.
  • Richard A. Bartle. Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs.
  • Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber. Challenges for Game Designers.
  • Greg Costikyan. “I Have No Words and I Must Design.”
  • Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev. Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanics, 2nd ed.
  • Aaron Frias. How to Create Your First Board Game.
  • Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball. Things We Think About Games.
  • Jeremy Holcomb. The White Box Essays.
  • Raph Koster. A Theory of Fun for Game Design.
  • Jesse Schell. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.
  • Ian Schreiber. Game Design Concepts.
  • David Sirlin. Playing to Win.
  • Tynan Sylvester. Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences.
  • Jeff Warrender. You Said This Would Be Fun.

Game Graphics

Games

  • Fred Wilson. 101 Questions on How to Play Chess.

Graphic Design, Logos, and Typography

  • David Airey. Logo Design Love, second edition.
  • Robert Bringhurst. The Elements of Typographic Style.
  • Sophie Cure and Aurélien Farina. Graphic Design Play Book: An Exploration of Visual Thinking.
  • Jon Dowling (Counter-Print). Logos from Japan.
  • Robin Williams. The Non-Designer’s Design Book.

Journaling and Planners

Yes, really. 🙂

Languages and Linguistics

  • David Crystal. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.
  • James W. Heisig. Remembering the Hiragana: A Complete Course on How to Teach Yourself the Japanese Syllabary in 3 Hours.

Math

  • Richard V. Andrée. Selections from Modern Abstract Algebra. A dated but delightful undergraduate-level introduction to abstract algebra and number theory.
  • Marcia Ascher. Ethnomathematics; Mathematics Elsewhere. Ethnomathematics.
  • Edwin H. Connell. Elements of Abstract and Linear Algebra. Undergraduate-level introduction.
  • Keith Devlin. The Math Gene.
  • Suzanne Frank. “Generalizations of the Postage Stamp Problem.” Fall 2014.
  • Paul Garrett. Making, Breaking Codes. Cryptology.
  • Heiko Knospe. A Course in Cryptography. Cryptology; the author explains that the text is using “cryptography” for both cryptography and cryptanalysis, per modern usage.
  • Philip Ording. 99 Variations on a Proof. My favorites: #36 Social Media, #65 Tea, and #98 Mondegreen.
  • John Allen Paulos. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences.
  • G. Polya. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method.
  • R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman. “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems.” One of the oldest public-key cryptosystems.
  • Sylvia Nasar. A Beautiful Mind. Biography of mathematician John Nash.

Military History and Ethics

  • Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley. Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder.
  • Ann Crossley and Carol A. Keller. The Army Wife Handbook, 2nd ed.
  • Paul Dickson. Chow: A Cook’s Tour of Military Food. I have not been brave enough to scale down the recipes (usually for 40 people)!
  • Martin J. Dougherty. World’s Worst Weapons: Exploding Tanks, Uncontrollable Ships, and Unflyable Aircraft.
  • James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi. Victory and Deceit: Dirty Tricks at War.
  • Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.
  • Samuel Hawley. The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China. Probably one of the best single-volume English-language overviews of that war. (The Stephen Turnbull texts are useful, but focus on the Japanese side of the war and have been propagating incorrect information about tide-based current shifts at Myeongnyang for decades.)
  • LTC Eric Hiu, USA (Ret.). Army Officer’s Guide, 54th ed.
  • William A. McIntosh. Guide to Effective Military Writing, 2nd ed.
  • Katharine H. S. Moon. Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations.
  • Aldo Nadi. Nadi on Fencing.
  • Roger H. Nye. The Challenge of Command.
  • Hugo Slim. Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War.
  • Captain E. D. Swinton, D.S.O., R.E., later Major General Sir Ernest Swinton, K.B.E., C.B., D.S.O. The Defence of Duffer’s Drift.
  • Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, trans. Ha Tae-hung, ed. Sohn Pow-key. Nanjung Ilgi: War Diary of Admiral Yi Sun-sin.
  • Sun Tzu. The Art of War.
  • FMFRP 12-2 Infantry in Battle. US infantry manual ca. the Great War.

Music

  • Winifred Phillips. A Composer’s Guide to Game Music.

Mysticism

  • Stefanie Caponi. Guided Tarot for Seamless Readings.

Psychology

  • Charles Hampden-Turner. Maps of the Mind. A survey of psychology frameworks and theories, some mainstream and some not, for lay readers.
  • Julian Jaynes. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Speaking of non-mainstream…
  • Stanley Milgram. Obedience to Authority. I’m aware of critiques of the Milgram experiments (ditto the Stanford Prison Experiment); the use case is thematic inspiration.
  • Natasha Dow Schüll. Addiction by Design.
  • Peter Watson. War on the Mind. Psychology in warfare.

Security

  • Ross Anderson. Security Engineering. From a narrative design standpoint for my use case, the edition doesn’t matter. Surprisingly approachable by lay readers. Do you need ideas for Leverage-style heists? Here you go!

Semiotics

  • Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation.

Usability Design (UX)

  • Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel. Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction.

Writing

I own that I don’t refer back to a ton of writing resources these days, but sometimes I find a terrific nugget of wisdom!

  • Bradley Raymond. 1 Page Screenplay. This is a solid introduction to the Campellian’s hero’s journey, but assumes that you’re coming to it (for screenplay purposes) from a cold start. That said, this includes the single most useful formulation of theme for a working writer that I’ve seen in four decades.