Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

Game jams are fun. They are a creative, exciting, social experience. The goal of a game jam is to design a video game, either alone or in teams, as fast as is humanly possible; usually in a single weekend.

The Game Jam Survival Guide, written to help you have more fun and achieve greater results at your next game jam by building a successful game without burning out, leads readers through each 12-hour phase of a 48-hour weekend game jam.

Weekend warriors: dominate your next game jam! If you follow the system shared in this book, you will be able to build an amazing game that you’re proud of and will entertain players, all in just one crazy 48-hour game jam weekend … and survive to tell the tale!

Embrace the best practices and techniques of past game jam winners and avoid common pitfalls along the way to the finish line. You too can survive a 48-hour game development marathon with your mind intact and an amazing game to show off to friends and family!

With The Game Jam Survival Guide you will learn the secret techniques that master game jammers use to create winning entries. It starts by showing you great ways to brainstorm and design a game based on a theme. It then moves on to highlight the best tools and techniques to finish a game in a weekend of coding. Anecdotes and advice from past winners and losers combined with humorous words of encouragement are sure to help you on your way. The author presents a list of game jams around the world Download Now »

Book Description

An all-in-one tutorial for planning, developing, and launching iPhone and iPad apps

The number of applications in the Apple app store is growing at a staggering rate. Want to get in the game, but don’t know iOS? This book-and-DVD package will help! With even little or no prior programming experience, you can learn the code necessary to build an app by following the how-to instructions in this book-and-video combo. Comprised of clear, no-nonsense lessons, the book walks you through each tutorial and then encourages you to work through simple exercises so that you can immediately apply what you just learned.

These lessons are backed by video demonstrations on the accompanying DVD to further illustrate the instruction and drive home the main points. In addition, the book’s appendices contain helpful information such as obtaining a device UDID, testing, and distributing an app and also lists common reasons why applications are rejected, so you can prepare to take precautionary measures to avoid these instances.

• Introduces iOS and helps you set up a development environment
• Highlights the basics of object-oriented programming principles as well as key objective-C concepts
• Examines Cocoa touch and the Cocoa touch framework, including using various classes in the UIKit and Foundation frameworks
• Looks at advanced concepts such as tab bars, web views Download Now »

Book Description

Learn how to quickly build cool electronic gadgets with .NET Gadgeteer. With the easy-to-follow instructions in this guide, you’ll tackle five fascinating projects, using Microsoft’s rapid prototyping Gadgeteer platform. There’s no soldering involved—you simply plug in modules that make gadget-building quick and easy.

Ideal for beginners, this book shows you how to work with modules and other hardware in the popular Fez Spider Starter Kit, and teaches you how to program your gadgets with Visual Studio C# Express and the .NET Micro Framework 4.1 SDK. You’ll soon learn a wide range of programming techniques along with the skills to design your own projects.

• Get to know the software and hardware with a simple LED project
• Download code from the companion site to build and test each project
• Build a spy camera that automatically captures and saves images at regular intervals
• Construct a simple animated game with the joystick module
• Create a web server that sends messages you draw or write on the touchscreen module
• Build a gadget that backs up digital images from an SD card to a USB flash drive
• Learn about other .NET Gadgeteer modules for creating environmental sensors, an MP3 player, and a WiFi network

Download Now »

Book Description

With this digital Early Release edition of HLSL and Pixel Shaders for XAML Developers, you get the entire book bundle in its earliest form – the author’s raw and unedited content – so you can take advantage of this content long before the book’s official release. You’ll also receive updates when significant changes are made, as well as the final ebook version.

Graphic Shaders are used throughout the game and movie industry to improve onscreen graphics. They are versatile, doing important tasks like making computer rendered aliens look realistic, providing the ripples on a background lake or growing fur on the latest Pixar monster. In the PC world, programmers are often delighted to find that shaders are nothing more than a miniature program that is optimized to run on the computers GPU. This happiness fades when they start exploring the strange programming model underlying shaders however. Because shaders are strung together in an unusual fashion and run on a massive parallel processer developers shouldn’t use their traditional OO or procedural approach to writing code. Writing effective shaders requires a mind shift regarding how to craft a useful algorithm. To top it off, shaders are written in a unfamiliar C-like language. In the Microsoft DirectX world the dominant language is High Level Shader Language or HLSL.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Shader 101
Chapter 2. Getting Started Download Now »

Book Description

Covers Xbox 360, Kinect, and Xbox LIVE

Step-by-step instructions with callouts to Xbox photos that show you exactly what to do

Help when you run into problems with Xbox 360, Kinect, or Xbox LIVE

Tips and Notes  to help you get the most from your Xbox 360 system

Full-color, step-by-step tasks show you how to have maximum fun with Xbox 360, Kinect, and Xbox LIVE! Learn how to:

• Quickly set up your Xbox 360, Kinect sensor, controllers, headset, and storage
• Network your Xbox using wireless or wired connections
• Join Xbox LIVE and start competing against gamers worldwide
• Create your avatar and personalize your entire Xbox experience
• Get great new content on Microsoft’s Game, Video, and Music Marketplaces
• Find, contact, and team up with friends on Xbox LIVE
• Protect your kids from inappropriate content
• Post on Facebook and Twitter from your Xbox
• Discover how Kinect is the future of motion control–now!
• Get great performance from your Kinect sensor
• Troubleshoot Xbox problems fast, so you can get back to having fun! Download Now »

Book Description

Build the Next Great Android Game!

Learning Android Game Programming is your hands-on, start-to-finish guide to creating winning games for today’s rapidly growing Android mobile device marketplace. If you have even basic Android development experience, Rick Rogers will help you build on your knowledge to quickly create low-budget 2D mobile games that sell.

The book starts with an up-to-the-minute overview of today’s Android mobile games marketplace, reviews each leading genre, and teaches you the foundational concepts of game development. You’ll design a simple game, then master every step of game development with AndEngine—the powerful, open source, free game-development engine. Every chapter teaches with sample code you can actually use, including many examples drawn from the published game, Virgins Versus Vampires (V3).

With this book you’ll learn how to

• Use free Android tools for creating code, artwork, and sound
• Implement the “game loop” that is at the heart of Android games
• Bring your game to life with scene transitions and entity modifiers
• Make the most of bitmap and vector graphics, sprites, and animation
• Integrate user input via touch, multitouch, keyboard, voice recognition, accelerometer, location, and compass
• Build infinite virtual worlds with tile maps Download Now »