Are there any GOOD books about TGF I can buy?

Alright, here's the situation. My introduction to The Games Factory was via the book titled, Awesome Game Creation; No Programming Required. I do not remember the author, because I've abandoned reading that book anymore, as it failed at helping me create any game I would enjoy playing.

There, I said it. This book sucked. It makes no mention of things like static engines, internal flags, etc. Instead, it devotes almost half of its pages to talking about how to design and market games--as though you'd actually need a PROGRAM to help you with that--in spite of the fact that it only came with the version that was for non-profit use only.

It taught me to make three games, essentially clones of Space Invaders, Hogan's Alley, and Kid Iccarrus. These went well enough, but when I tried to make a decent platformer on it, I was dumbfounded by the apparent lack of tools that I for a while believed that TGF was, in fact, a scam that could not do nearly everything that dumb book and other sources claimed it could.

Now, since visiting MFGG, and seeing some legitimitely good games, I no longer view this as a scam; however, I still am enraged at how cheated that dumb book left me. Considering all those pages devoted to designing games, it might have been nice to help the readers actually DEVELOP what they envisioned.

Lacking even the slightest ideas of how to approach good game creation, I sought help on these forums. Unfortunately, there were just too many factors I apparently wasn't ready for. A question about static once only earned me a response that if I didn't understand it, I was not ready to make an enngine with it. People here apparently think I need to break my teeth on something simpler first, and they're probably right, but I maintain that it should be a good deal more complex than what was in my first TGF book.

So any recommendations of books that have good TGF tutorials? An outright users guide with an index would be good, too.

One found from Amazon, but it's pretty expensive

It strikes me that AMazon has almost NO info on that book. So what makes you think it's a good buy?

He is just suggesting, though maybe you could search around and see if there are any good rated TGF books. Or you could learn it solo by messing around with it.

I didn't require any book or even any help file to work TGF as efficiently as I do now. I highly doubt you really need one. Just figure things out.

Perhaps you should try searching Google for TGF tutorials. I found this one right away.

Thanks, Grant. That'll probably help.

@Yoshi: No doubt one can learn TGF by trial and error, but I'd rather not. It's hard for me to envision what can be created with a lot of mathematical mumbo-jumbo (I'm right-brained) without some sort of guide, and I've had to many instances where I tried to learn myself by setting me up an exercise, and had no idea how to9 go about making what I'd envisioned.

Edit: OK, one quick question. I downloaded the platforming tutorial Hatsu made on this link ( http://website.lineone.net/~hatsu/TGFBEGIN.html ), and attempted to replicate it. But there's just one peculiarity. Hatsu's tutorial was never liable to any of the "wall-crawling" glitches that usually plague the built-in platforming movement of TGF, even though his Tut uses the built-in movement. My attempt at replication still involved characters not falling anyomre when they collided with the side of an obstacle, instead of just the top. Can platform movement vets analyze his tutorial to see what I'm doing wrong?

This post has been edited by Bahmo on May 5 2007, 06:57 PM