About this book

It is obvious from the title of this book that it is about the making of the Coffee Quest series of games. There are a number of goals for this book. The three predominant goals are to Provide players with information on completing the games, providing information for those people who want to use the source code, and to document the history of the game.

The strategy guides for each of the games are going to be part of the book. While some people may not think that the strategy guides belong in a book about the creation of a game, I consider the strategy guides to be the final version of the design specifications and as such a vital part of the book. This has the added benefit of having people who normally would not look at a book on game development looking at one. While most of those people will only look at the strategy portions of the book, some may venture into looking at other sections of the book and may actually discover that the creation of games is something that they too could do.

As the Coffee Quest series is slowly being released as Open Source, having a book about how the game was put together will help anybody who wants to use the source code in the creation of their own game or to modify the source code to add new features to the existing games. While some of the book will take a look at pieces of the code that make up the game, the far more important goal behind this book will be to take a broader look at how the game works. By doing this, the reader will be able to apply the techniques discussed to their own projects without having to use any of the source code. Why would anybody want to re-create the code when the source code already exists? By creating the code yourself, you own the code (that is why I like writing all of my own code instead of taking code from other projects). When you use open source code you are tied to that license, which may not matter if you were planning on open sourcing your code anyway but can matter greatly if you are not.

The final predominant reason for this book is more of a personal reason than anything. In twenty or thirty years – assuming that the world still exists and that I am still alive – I want to read this book and other books I have written. I am not vain enough to think that my site, books, and games will have any impact on the rest of the world, but to me they are very important things. I do hope that other people gain at least a bit of enjoyment from my work as that is the purpose of creating entertainment.