Appendix A: Resources

Updated: 2025-03-27.

For personal reference. Compilation in progress, with occasional annotations. These categories are grouped in a way that makes sense to me. All prices are in $ (USD) unless otherwise specified.

Current focus: Defold tutorials.

Animation

  • Ellen Besen, illus. Bryce Hallett. Animation Unleashed. Terrific on the theory and practice of animation tying into narrative design.
  • Aaron Blaise. Various video workshops. If you want to animate animals, there are a lot of specific workshops for critters!
  • Preston Blair. Cartoon Animation with Preston Blair and Advanced Animation. The former is a classic; the latter is hard to get a hold of but fun if you can find it.
  • Eric Goldberg. Character Animation Crash Course! Great at breaking things down, really great “backwards design” pedagogical structure.
  • Ed Hooks. Acting for Animators, 4th ed. Digs into acting principles for character animation.
  • 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. Dated on some of the tech/software, but a terrific guide to the process.
  • Richard Williams. The Animator’s Survival Kit. I don’t think I need to say anything more!

Art, Cartooning, Comics, and Sequential Art

See also Crafts. I’ve separated them not because I don’t think crafts aren’t Art but because it makes the list easier for me to navigate lolsob.

Art and Designs: Asian (look, I’m trying to keep the category list from exploding lolsob)

  • Jae-sik Suh. Korean Patterns. Beautiful photography; makes me nostalgic for my late grandparents’ old traditional-style house.
  • Andrew W. Tuer. Japanese Stencil Designs. From the excellent Dover Pictorial Archive series.

Art synectics

  • Brenda Robson. Art Synectics.
  • Nicholas Roukes. Art Synectics. This broke my head open when I found it in high school.

Brush painting (Far Eastern)

  • Sungsook Hong Setton. The Spirit of the Brush: Chinese Brush Painting Techniques: Simplicity, Spirit, and Personal Journey.

Character design

  • Kenneth Anderson, Devon Cady-Lee, Cécile Carre, and Hollie Mengert. Creating Characters for the Entertainment Industry: Character Design for Animation, Illustration and Video Game. Terrific rundown discussing animation vs. illustration vs. video game use cases, with examples and exercises.

Color

  • Shigenobu Kobayashi, Colorist: A Practical Handbook for Personal and Professional Use.
  • Teruko Sakurai. Traditional Colors of Japan: The Complete Guide for Designers and Graphic Artists. “Japanese color harmony dictionary.”

Comics and sequential art

  • Nate Piekos. The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering.
  • Jason Brubaker. I had the fortune to take his course on making comics. I learned so much about the medium from him.
  • 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!
  • Pratima Pinnepalli. Terrific zines, art, comics. She’s running a zine/comic workshop series at my local public library!

Composition, narrative, visual development

  • Molly Bang. Picture This: How Pictures Work. If you read one book on illustration for narrative, read this.

Digital painting and illustration

Drawing (general)

  • Jim Dunavent. How to Draw Airplanes. Despite this being tightly focused on airplanes, this also functions as a miniature general drawing course!
  • Alphonso Dunn. Pen and Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide. The workbook for this is great too.
  • 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.
  • Attabeira German de Turowski. The Art of One-Line Drawing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Beautiful Continuous Line Drawings. An unusual and beautiful stylized art approach!

Environments, architecture, landscape

  • Margaret Fletcher. Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide.

Figure drawing, gesture drawing, and anatomy

  • Noah Bradley. Paint Figures Better. This is not a how-to as such, but a delicious smorgasbord of approaches and ways to think about learning figure painting. Hat-tip to Stephanie Folse for introducing me to his work.
  • Frank Cho. Drawing Beautiful Women: The Frank Cho Method. Out of print, but I loved this. Note that it has pretty saucy humor!
  • Michael Hampton. Gesture Drawing: Dynamic Movement and Form.
  • 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!

Perspective

  • Scott Robertson with Thomas Bertling. How to Draw. The go-to for drawing in perspective.

Cinematography and Storyboarding

  • Patti Bellantoni. If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling. I can’t unsee all the examples! Try watching Marvel’s Defenders TV show with this in mind.
  • Joseph V. Mascelli. The Five C’s of Cinematography. This starts from zero and goes through basic cinematography systematically with a ton of examples and clear explanations.
  • Woody Woodman. Storyboarding with Woody Woodman (paid video course).

Crafts

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

Needle Arts

Papercrafts

  • Jessica Baldry. The Papercraft Ideas Book. Incredibly beautiful examples from a variety of artists and cultures.
  • Peter Saydak. Everyone Can Learn Origami.

Creativity and Motivation

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

Engineering

Mechanical Engineering

Fashion

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

Game Coding and Development: General

  • Michael Futter. The Gamedev Budgeting Handbook: How to Finish Your Game on Time and on Budget! To read, even on indie DIY hobby mode.
  • Michael Futter. The Gamedev Business Handbook: How to Build the Business You’ll Build Games With! To read, even on indie DIY hobby mode.
  • Matt Hackett. How to Make a Video Game by Yourself: 10 Steps, Just You and a Computer. This is not about coding, but about project planning and scoping, and making sure you stay motivated as an indie dev.
  • Robert Nystrom. Game Programming Patterns. Thanks to my sister! Also available online.
  • 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! There are editions available for C++, JavaScript, Lua, and Python as well!
  • CS50x 2025 [Harvard, available for “free” as OpenCourseWare]. To investigate. I could use the refresher. (I did two years of CS at Cornell a kazillion years ago as a prospective CS major before switching…into math, which is what I got my B.A. in.)
  • CS50’s Introduction to Game Development [YouTube playlist, Harvard].
  • Learn C++. Not game-specific, but…
  • Red Blob Games. “I make interactive visual explanations of math and algorithms, using motivating examples from computer games.”

Game Coding and Development: C#, Unity, and Friends

Unity and Friends: books

  • 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.
  • RB Whitaker. The C# Player’s Guide, 5th ed.

Unity and Friends: narrative scripting

Unity assets

Unity and Wwise

Game Coding and Development: Defold and Friends

Defold

Tutorials:

  • Defold video tutorials. Next up!
  • Side scroller tutorial.
  • Walking astronaut tutorial – in progress.
  • Defold 101: Source-Available Game Development [Zenva, free course – requires registration]. Useful orientation to the IDE. Note: I’ve heard mixed reviews of Zenva courses generally, but for a free beginner tutorial, this is pretty reasonable so far.
    • 1. Course Prerequisites
    • 2. Introduction. – done.
    • 3. Defold Installation and Version. – done.
    • 4. Installing Defold. This course runs on Defold v.1.8.1 [Github]. – done.
    • 5. Creating a New Project. – done.
    • 6. Editor Overview. – done.
    • 7. Building Blocks – Part 1 – done.
      • Collections – file that can contain game objects and other collections, cf. “scene.”
      • game objects – represent game entities; position, rotation, and scale; contain components that give the game object functionality and substance. e.g. players, enemies, pickups. Can have game object as a child of another object (drag and drop onto the parent-to-be).
      • components – give logic to game components; e.g. sprites, colliders, scripts, sound, particle effects; a game object can have as many components as needed.
    • 8. Building Blocks – Part 2. – done.
    • 9. Quiz – Building blocks. – done.
    • 10. Sprite Setup. – done.
    • 11. Move, Rotate, and Scale – Part 1. – in progress.
    • 12. Move, Rotate, and Scale – Part 2.
    • 13. Inputs – Part 1.
    • 14. Inputs – Part 2.
    • 15. Intro to Scripting.
    • 16. Callback Functions.
    • 17. Quiz – Callback Functions.
    • 18. First Line of Code.
    • 19. Variables – Part 1.
    • 20. Variables – Part 2.
    • 21. Operators – Part 1.
    • 22. Operators – Part 2.
    • 23. If Statements – Part 1.
    • 24. If Statements – Part 2.
    • 25. If Statements – Part 3.
    • 26. Functions – Part 1.
    • 27. Functions – Part 2.
    • 28. Functions – Part 3.
    • 29. Quiz – Scripting.
    • 30. Message Passing.
    • 31. Conclusion.
    • 32. Full Source Code – Defold 101.
    • 33. Next Steps.
  • Defold-beginner-roadmap [Github].
  • Defold for Beginners [YouTube playlist].
  • Defold Game Engine Crash Course.
  • defold-card-game-tutorial – Not yet started.
  • Get started with Defold, Lua. A collection of resources and some tips.
  • tutorial-war-battles – Game embryo tutorial. Not yet started.

Walkthroughs

Defold: assets and extensions

Lua

other

Game Coding and Development: Godot and Friends

Godot: books

Godot: online resources

Godot: game jams

Godot: narrative scripting

Godot: adaptive audio in Godot itself

Godot with FMOD

Godot with Wwise

Game Coding and Development: Ren’Py, Python, and Friends

Breaking out a separate section for Monte Carlo Simulation materials.

Game Coding and Development: Solar2D

To explore later.

  • Solar2D. “A Lua based game engine with focus on ease of iterations and usage.”

Game Coding and Development: Visual Novels

Game Design

General Game Design

  • Richard A. Bartle. Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs. Looking at different player types and the game systems that appeal to them.
  • Greg Costikyan. “I Have No Words and I Must Design.” Seminal essay on game design theory as a necessary field.
  • Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball. Things We Think About Games. Thought-provoking ideas.
  • Raph Koster. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. A fascinating and wide-ranging approach to the idea of “fun.”
  • Jesse Schell. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. This is a terrific philosophical approach to game design and I’m still mad that my original copy, which was much more affordable at the time, was a flood casualty! I shelled out for a replacement, although this is textbook-typically spendy.
  • Tynan Sylvester. Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences.Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences.

Gameplay Meta

  • John Wick. Play Dirty. The game designer, not the movie character!

Interactive Fiction and Narrative Game Design

Tabletop Game Design

  • Avery Alder. Designing Games That Matter (resources; I have not attended this workshop).
  • Gabe Barrett. Find the Fun: How to Go from Idea to Published Game. A great starting point with a ton of food for thought. See also Board Game Design Lab: Prototypes.
  • Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber. Challenges for Game Designers. While this is aimed toward videogame designers, the exercises are all analog. I love the early example of how one would paper prototype a first-person shooter like Doom!
  • Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev. Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanics, 2nd ed. A terrific resource.
  • Aaron Frias. How to Create Your First Board Game. Aimed toward beginners with exercises. I really enjoyed this.
  • Jeremy Holcomb. The White Box Essays. If I were recommending a single short, affordable read for someone getting started in tabletop game design, it would probably be this one!
  • Ian Schreiber. Game Design Concepts. This is a self-contained, blog-based online course in tabletop game design; it’s not currently “running” and unfortunately link rot has hit some of the course materials/readings, but it’s a terrific free starting point.
  • Jeff Warrender. You Said This Would Be Fun.

Videogame Design

Game Design Documents

Templates

Examples:

Game Graphics

Game Jams

Godot-specific

Games

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

Graphic Design, Logos, and Typography

Graphic Design (general)

  • Sophie Cure and Aurélien Farina. Graphic Design Play Book: An Exploration of Visual Thinking.
  • Robin Williams. The Non-Designer’s Design Book. Speaking as someone who read this book and discovered I had literally committed every design sin in the book…
  • Augusta Scarlett on Book Cover Design Advice. Augusta’s an old friend; almost everything I know about Design 101 comes from her. (I’m not making a book cover, but some of the same general considerations apply.)

Fonts, Lettering, Typography

  • Robert Bringhurst. The Elements of Typographic Style.
  • Ellen Lupton. Thinking with Type, 3rd ed., revised and expanded.
  • Nate Piekos. The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering.
  • DaFont – great place to find free as well as commercial fonts.
  • FontSelf (iPadOS).

Logos

  • David Airey. Logo Design Love, second edition.
  • Jon Dowling (Counter-Print). Logos from Japan.

Journaling and Planners

Yes, really. 🙂 Shout-out to Vernieda for this entire planner journey!

Languages and Linguistics

Linguistics (general)

  • David Crystal. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.

Japanese

  • James W. Heisig. Remembering the Hiragana: A Complete Course on How to Teach Yourself the Japanese Syllabary in 3 Hours.

Marketing

Math

Abstract algebra, number theory (see also Cryptology for references specifically focused on that discipline)

  • random.org – “RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs.” Overkill for a lot of use cases, but I like it.

Complex analysis

  • Tristan Needham. Visual Complex Analysis. Hat-tip to Peter Berman.

Cryptology (cryptography, cryptanalysis, codes, ciphers, steganography)

  • 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. Undergraduate-level textbook written for a STEM audience rather than a specifically math major audience.
  • 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.

Ethnomathematics, math biography, math culture, math history

  • Marcia Ascher. Ethnomathematics; Mathematics Elsewhere. Ethnomathematics.
  • Keith Devlin. The Math Gene.
  • Sylvia Nasar. A Beautiful Mind. Biography of mathematician John Nash.
  • John Allen Paulos. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences.

Proof and problem-solving

  • G. Polya. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method.
  • Philip Ording. 99 Variations on a Proof. My favorites: #36 Social Media, #65 Tea, and #98 Mondegreen.

Transfinite numbers

  • Leapfrogs Group. Images of Infinity.
  • Roger Penrose. The Emperor’s New Mind, specifically the footnote regarding Cantor’s diagonal slash proof that the real numbers “outnumber” the natural numbers.

Military History and Ethics

Arms and armor

  • Martin J. Dougherty. World’s Worst Weapons: Exploding Tanks, Uncontrollable Ships, and Unflyable Aircraft.

Dueling and fencing

  • Aldo Nadi. Nadi on Fencing.

Genocide and Killing

  • Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley. Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder.
  • Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.
  • Hugo Slim. Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War.

Military culture

  • 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) and cook them!
  • Colonel Ardant du Picq. Battle Studies; Ancient and Modern Battle [Project Gutenberg]. Trans. Robert Christie Cotton and John N. Greely. “[A] military treatise written during the late 19th century, specifically addressing the human elements and psychological factors underlying warfare. The work emphasizes the importance of morale, discipline, and understanding the human condition in the context of battle, exploring how these components have remained consistent throughout military history, from ancient to modern times.” Hi! Guess who read this as research for Ninefox Gambit the novel.
  • 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.
  • Roger H. Nye. The Challenge of Command. Terrific source of reading lists on various topics.

Military history

  • 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.)
  • Brian Lavery, compiled by. The Royal Navy Officer’s Pocket-Book, 1944.
  • Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, trans. Ha Tae-hung, ed. Sohn Pow-key. Nanjung Ilgi: War Diary of Admiral Yi Sun-sin.

Strategy, tactics, operations

  • James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi. Victory and Deceit: Dirty Tricks at 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.
  • 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 and Spirituality

Astrology

  • Theresa Reed. Astrology for Real Life: A Workbook for Beginners.

Tarot

  • Stefanie Caponi. Guided Tarot for Seamless Readings.
  • Tina Gong. Tarot.

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 don’t refer 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.