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Book Description

The Game Maker’s Companion is the long-awaited sequel to The Game Maker’s Apprentice. This book picks up where the last book left off, advancing your game development journey with some seriously impressive gaming projects. This time you’ll learn how to make professional-quality platform games with solid collision detection and slick control mechanisms and you’ll get acquainted with a long-lost icon of platform gaming history on the way.

You’ll go on to discover techniques to add depth and believability to the characters and stories in your games, including The Monomyth, cut scene storyboarding, and character archetypes. This culminates in the creation of an original atmospheric platform-adventure which will take your GML programming skills to new heights. There’s even a handy reference section at the back of the book which will be invaluable for adding common features to your own games.

With contributions from four games industry professionals and a highly respected member of the Game Maker community, The Game Maker’s Companion is another labor of love that will give you even more hours of enjoyment than the original. If you already own Game Maker then you really must own this book as well. Download Now »

Book Description

Get Started Fast with iOS Game Programming

Since the launch of the App Store, games have been the hottest category of apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. That means your best chance of tapping into the iPhone/iPad “Gold Rush” is to put out a killer game that everyone wants to play (and talk about). While many people think games are hard to build, they can actually be quite easy, and Learning iOS Game Programming is your perfect beginner’s guide. Michael Daley walks you through every step as you build a killer 2D game for the iPhone.

In Learning iOS Game Programming, you’ll learn how to build a 2D tile map game, Sir Lamorak’s Quest: The Spell of Release (which is free in the App Store). You can download and play the game you’re going to build while you learn about the code and everything behind the scenes. Daley identifies the key characteristics of a successful iPhone game and introduces the technologies, terminology, and tools you will use. Then, he carefully guides you through the whole development process: from planning storylines and game play all the way through testing and tuning.

Download the free version of Sir Lamorak’s Quest from the App Store today, while you learn how to build the game in this book.

Coverage includes:

• Planning high-level game design, components, and difficulty levels Download Now »

Book Description

Creating games in Flash is a never-ending journey of exploration, learning, and most of all, fun. Once you’ve mastered the basics, a new world is opened up to you, enabling you to take your existing skills to the next level and discover new skills that will in turn open new doors. This book is a direct continuation of Foundation Game Design with Flash, and is a complete point-by-point roundup of the most important skills a Flash game designer needs to know. You’ll increase your ActionScript knowledge and your game design skills while creating some excellent example games. You’ll learn advanced collision detection skills; professional AI and pathfinding; and how to load and save game data, create destructible environments, and build and switch game levels.

• Each chapter highlights a new advanced technique illustrated by practical examples.
• Examples of games are given in a variety of genres, all of which take an object-oriented programming approach.
• Advanced game design topics are covered, including vector-based collision reaction, pathfinding, billiard ball physics, and modeling game data.

What you’ll learn

• How to use vectors to figure out where objects are going and how they should react to collisions
• Pixel-perfect collision detection for irregular shapes using hitTest and bitmapData
• How to use design patterns and abstract data models to manage complex games efficiently Download Now »

Book Description

The Web is increasingly happening in realtime. With websites such as Facebook and Twitter leading the way, users are coming to expect that all sites should serve content as it occurs — on smartphones as well as computers. This book shows you how to build realtime user experiences by adding chat, streaming content, and including more features on your site one piece at a time, without making big changes to the existing infrastructure. You’ll also learn how to serve realtime content beyond the browser.

Throughout the book are many practical JavaScript and Python examples that you can use on your site now. And in the final chapter, you’ll build a location-aware game that combines all of the technologies discussed.

• Use the latest realtime syndication technology, including PubSubHubbub
• Build dynamic widgets on your homepage to show realtime updates from several sources
• Learn how to use long polling to “push” content from your server to browsers
• Create an application using the Tornado web server that makes sense of massive amounts of streaming content
• Understand the unique requirements for setting up a basic chat service
• Use IM and SMS to enable users to interact with your site outside of a web browser
• Implement custom analytics to measure engagement in realtim

Table of Contents Download Now »

Book Description

Deliver Better Games Faster, On Budget—And Make Game Development Fun Again!

Game development is in crisis—facing bloated budgets, impossible schedules, unmanageable complexity, and death march overtime. It’s no wonder so many development studios are struggling to survive. Fortunately, there is a solution. Scrum and Agile methods are already revolutionizing development outside the game industry. Now, long-time game developer Clinton Keith shows exactly how to successfully apply these methods to the unique challenges of game development.

Keith has spent more than fifteen years developing games, seven of them with Scrum and agile methods. Drawing on this unparalleled expertise, he shows how teams can use Scrum to deliver games more efficiently, rapidly, and cost-effectively; craft games that offer more entertainment value; and make life more fulfilling for development teams at the same time.

You’ll learn to form successful agile teams that incorporate programmers, producers, artists, testers, and designers—and promote effective collaboration within and beyond those teams, throughout the entire process. From long-range planning to progress tracking and continuous integration, Keith offers dozens of tips, tricks, and solutions—all based firmly in reality and hard-won experience. Download Now »

Book Description

This book will provide you with a comprehensive guide to developing games for both the Windows Mobile platform and the Windows Phone using the industry standard programming languages C# and VB.NET.

You will be walked through every aspect of developing for the Windows Mobile platform—from setting up your development environment for the first time to creating advanced 3D graphics. Finally, you’ll learn how you can make your applications available to others, whether distributing for free or selling online.

Using extensive code samples throughout, you’ll gather all the information needed to create your own games and distribute them successfully for others to enjoy.

Aimed primarily at C# developers, almost everything in the book can be used in VB.NET too. For those areas where this is not the case, workarounds are suggested so that VB.NET developers are still able to use the techniques described. Download Now »