Fiction by

Brent Knowles

novel & story collections

How to Start a Career in Game Design

cover for book 1 in the lazy designer series
Practical advice on starting a career in the video game industry and improving your design skills. This is your opportunity to learn from the lead designer of such commercial and critically successful video games as Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age: Origins.

Lazy Designer Series (Basic)

cover for complete lazy designer
All Five Books... Over 500 pages! The Complete Lazy Design Collection, from starting a career to becoming a design lead.

How to Make the Next Game

cover for book 2 in the Lazy Designer Series
The author, an industry veteran with over ten years experience (lead designer Dragon Age Origins) explains how companies decide which videogames to make, how to build designer-friendly game engines and pipelines and how to prototype and test.
Along the way the author explores his own experiences with game development and the difficulties he encountered adjusting to life at his dream job. With practical and blunt advice, the Lazy Designer will give you the skills necessary for becoming a valued, and maybe even essential, member of any development team.

How to Design Gameplay and Exploration

image for Lazy Designer #3
Brent Knowles continues his Lazy Designer series with a look at exploration and gameplay. From environment design to combat to building rule systems, Brent examines how to craft quality design. Includes practical advice for designers already working in the games industry and wishing to hone their skills as well as for those aspiring to such a career.

How To Design Story and Build Worlds

cover for Lazy Designer #4
Learn to craft interactive worlds, write non-linear narrative, and create characters that players care about. Games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age resonate with game players around the world. This is your opportunity to learn the process behind creating such rich experiences.

How to be a Lead Designer

cover the Lazy Designer #5
This standalone volume in the Lazy Designer series provides insights on becoming an effective lead designer or creative director. Learn to manage large teams of specialized designers, improve your decision making process, and write clear and usable documentation.

[W]e ... root for

It's a really neat idea, and the character that Knowles explores it through is someone that we can relate to and root for as he grapples with his failures, both to his family and his species

Sin and Toil | Brandon Crilly

explores the high-tech world

Knowles writes with a fresh outlook on sci-fi and has created a strange new world that sounds daunting even if it is far away.

Digital Rights | Sandra Scholes

Brent Knowles is a regular in ‘On Spec’...

Levi is experimenting to find out if faith is enough to build a well-rounded personality or if the certainty of an afterlife would be better. The story alternates Levi’s point of view with Carol’s and is an interesting meditation on a philosophical and religious issue.

A Primer on the Ins and Outs of Building Bliss | Eamonn Murphy

the story is neatly done

‘Sin And Toil’ is solid Science Fiction. A man lives a life of lonely, hard toil preparing a home for his wife and children. He’s on another planet, terraforming on a small scale. They’re back on terra which is experiencing environmental catastrophe. There’s a clever premise behind it...

Sin and Toil | SFcrowsnest

Nikki 2.3

The narrator is the mind of a sexbot simulation, yearning for liberation. Fortunately, she is able to remotely control an electronic masturbator and is now able to meet the real world...

Nikki 2.3 (Mama Collection) | Lois Tilton

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