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Books > Computing & IT > Computer software packages > Computer games
Welcome to Game Audio Programming: Principles and Practices! This book is the first of its kind: an entire book dedicated to the art of game audio programming. With over fifteen chapters written by some of the top game audio programmers and sound designers in the industry, this book contains more knowledge and wisdom about game audio programming than any other volume in history. One of the goals of this book is to raise the general level of game audio programming expertise, so it is written in a manner that is accessible to beginners, while still providing valuable content for more advanced game audio programmers. Each chapter contains techniques that the authors have used in shipping games, with plenty of code examples and diagrams. There are chapters on the fundamentals of audio representation and perception; advanced usage of several different audio middleware platforms (Audiokinetic Wwise, CRI ADX2, and FMOD Studio); advanced topics including Open Sound Control, Vector-Based Amplitude Panning, and Dynamic Game Data; and more! Whether you're an audio programmer looking for new techniques, an up-and-coming game developer looking for an area to focus on, or just the one who got saddled with the audio code, this book has something for you. Cutting-edge advanced game audio programming concepts, with examples from real games and audio engines Includes perspectives of both audio programmers and sound designers on working and communicating together Coverage not just on game audio engine design, but also on implementing audio tools and working with sound designers providing a comprehensive perspective on being an audio programmer
The Paradox of Transgression in Games looks at transgressive games as an aesthetic experience, tackling how players respond to game content that shocks, disturbs, and distresses, and how contemporary video games can evoke intense emotional reactions. The book delves into the commercial success of many controversial videogames: although such games may appear shocking for the observing bystander, playing them is experienced as deeply rewarding for the player. Drawing on qualitative player studies and approaches from media aesthetics theory, the book challenges the perception of games as innocent entertainment, and examines the range of emotional, moral, and intellectual experiences of players. As they explore what players consider transgressive, the authors ask whether there is something about the gameplay situation that works to mitigate the sense of transgression, stressing gameplay as an aesthetic experience. Anchoring the aesthetic game experience both in play studies as well as in aesthetic theory, this book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of game studies, aesthetics, media studies, philosophy of art, and emotions.
This book covers the distinguishing characteristics and tropes of visual novels (VNs) as choice-based games and analyzes VNs like 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Hatoful Boyfriend; and Monster Prom, some of the best examples of the genre as illustrations. The author covers structuring branching narrative and plot, designing impactful and compelling choices, writing entertaining relationships and character interactions, understanding the importance of a VN's prose, and planning a VN's overall narrative design and story delivery. The book contains exercises at the end of chapters to practice the techniques discussed. By the end of the book, if the reader finishes all the exercises, they may have several portfolio pieces or a significant portion of their own VN project designed. Features: Discusses different aspects and genres of VNs, what makes them enjoyable, and successful techniques developers can incorporate into their own games Analyzes various VNs and choice-based games that use these successful techniques Shares tips from developers on portfolio pieces, hiring a team to work on VNs, and plotting and outlining VNs Branching Story, Unlocked Dialogue: Designing and Writing Visual Novels is a valuable resource for developers and narrative designers interested in working on VNs. The book will show them how they can design their own VN projects, design branching narratives, develop entertaining plots and relationships, design impactful and compelling choices, and write prose that's a pleasure to read.
This book explores hybrid play as a site of interdisciplinary activity-one that is capable of generating new forms of mobility, communication, subjects, and artistic expression as well as new ways of interacting with and understanding the world. The chapters in this collection explore hybrid making, hybrid subjects, and hybrid spaces, generating interesting conversations about the past, current and future nature of hybrid play. Together, the authors offer important insights into how place and space are co-constructed through play; how, when, and for what reasons people occupy hybrid spaces; and how cultural practices shape elements of play and vice versa. A diverse group of scholars and practitioners provides a rich interdisciplinary perspective, which will be of great interest to those working in the areas of games studies, media studies, communication, gender studies, and media arts.
Artificial Intelligence Techniques in IoT Sensor Networks is a technical book which can be read by researchers, academicians, students and professionals interested in artificial intelligence (AI), sensor networks and Internet of Things (IoT). This book is intended to develop a shared understanding of applications of AI techniques in the present and near term. The book maps the technical impacts of AI technologies, applications and their implications on the design of solutions for sensor networks. This text introduces researchers and aspiring academicians to the latest developments and trends in AI applications for sensor networks in a clear and well-organized manner. It is mainly useful for research scholars in sensor networks and AI techniques. In addition, professionals and practitioners working on the design of real-time applications for sensor networks may benefit directly from this book. Moreover, graduate and master's students of any departments related to AI, IoT and sensor networks can find this book fascinating for developing expert systems or real-time applications. This book is written in a simple and easy language, discussing the fundamentals, which relieves the requirement of having early backgrounds in the field. From this expectation and experience, many libraries will be interested in owning copies of this work.
Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people's favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.
Role-play as a Heritage Practice is the first book to examine physically performed role-enactments, such as live-action role-play (LARP), tabletop role-playing games (TRPG), and hobbyist historical reenactment (RH), from a combined game studies and heritage studies perspective. Demonstrating that non-digital role-plays, such as TRPG and LARP, share many features with RH, the book contends that all three may be considered as heritage practices. Studying these role-plays as three distinct genres of playful, participatory and performative forms of engagement with cultural heritage, Mochocki demonstrates how an exploration of the affordances of each genre can be valuable. Showing that a player's engagement with history or heritage material is always multi-layered, the book clarifies that the layers may be conceptualised simultaneously as types of heritage authenticity and as types of in-game immersion. It is also made clear that RH, TRPG and LARP share commonalities with a multitude of other media, including video games, historical fiction and film. Existing within, and contributing to, the fiction and non-fiction mediasphere, these role-enactments are shaped by the same large-scale narratives and discourses that persons, families, communities, and nations use to build memory and identity. Role-play as a Heritage Practice will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, memory, nostalgia, role-playing, historical games, performance, fans and transmedia narratology.
Celebrate the holidays in Tamriel with this 25-day advent calendar! Inspired by the hit video game series, The Elder Scrolls: The Official Advent Calendar features 25 days of exclusive surprises including keychains, high-quality stickers, recipe cards, mini booklets, and more unique keepsakes. The perfect gift for gamers of all ages, The Elder Scrolls: The Official Advent Calendar brings the epic world of Tamriel to your holiday celebrations!
This book offers critical perspectives on the digital 'iconic', exploring how the notion of the iconic is re-appropriated and re-made online, and the consequences for humanity and society. Examining cross-cultural case studies of iconic images in digital spaces, the author offers original and critical analyses, theories and perspectives on the notion of the 'iconic', and on its movement, re-appropriation and meaning making on digital platforms. A carefully curated selection of case studies illustrates topics such as phantom memory; martyrdom; denigration and pornographic recoding; digital games as simulacra; and memes as 'artification'. Situating the notion of the iconic firmly within contemporary cultures, the author takes a thematic approach to investigate the iconic as an unstable and unfinished phenomenon online as it travels through platforms temporally and spatially. The book will be an important resource for academics and students in the areas of media and communications, digital culture, cultural studies, visual communication, visual culture, journalism studies and digital humanities.
a balanced blend of theoretical and practical information that enables readers to develop 3D worlds quickly and efficiently.
Expert advice from several industrial professionals who have worked for some of the world's biggest tech and interactive companies. Best practices that not only prepare writers on how to apply their craft to new fields, but also prepare them for the common ambiguity they will find in corporate and start-up environments. Breakdown of platforms that shows how tech capabilities can fulfill content expectations and how content can fulfill tech expectations. Basic storytelling mechanics customized to today's popular technologies and traditional gaming platforms.
- The first book dedicated to exploring key video games from the 1970s to present day. - Provides a highly accessible overview of the history of video games from PONG, Pac-Man and Tetris to Minecraft, Animal Crossing and Assassin's Creed. - The selection covers a range of historical periods and platforms, genres, commercial impact, artistic choices, contexts of play, typical and atypical representations, uses of games for specific purposes, uses of materials or techniques, specific subcultures, repurposing, transgressive aesthetics, interfaces, moral or ethical impacts, and more.
The Art of Game Design guides you through the design process step-by-step, helping you to develop new and innovative games that will be played again and again. It explains the fundamental principles of game design and demonstrates how tactics used in classic board, card and athletic games also work in top-quality video games. Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible, and award-winning author Jesse Schell presents over 100 sets of questions to ask yourself as you build, play and change your game until you finalise your design. This latest third edition includes examples from new VR and AR platforms as well as from modern games such as Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us, Free to Play games, hybrid games, transformational games, and more. Whatever your role in video game development an understanding of the principles of game design will make you better at what you do. For over 10 years this book has provided inspiration and guidance to budding and experienced game designers - helping to make better games faster.
A uniquely cross-disciplinary and cross-experience book written as an accessible guide for people new to storytelling in games, new to games as a practice, and those eager to develop their existing practices & knowledge around storytelling in games. Offers careful, clear, and practical advice for understanding creative writing, in the context of games, and in discovering and developing your own games writing practice. Focuses on writing, not narrative design, as an area underdeveloped in the context of games storytelling.
Successful games merge art and technology in truly unique ways. Fused under tight production deadlines and strict performance requirements, shaped by demanding player expectations, games are among the most complex software projects created today. Game AI Pro: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals covers both the art and the technology of game AI. Nothing covered is theory or guesswork. The book brings together the accumulated wisdom, cutting-edge ideas, and clever tricks and techniques of 54 of today's top game AI professionals. Some chapters present techniques that have been developed and passed down within the community for years while others discuss the most exciting new research and ideas from today's most innovative games. The book includes core algorithms that you'll need to succeed, such as behavior trees, utility theory, spatial representation, path planning, motion control, and tactical reasoning. It also describes tricks and techniques that will truly bring your game to life, including perception systems, social modeling, smart camera systems, player prediction, and even an AI sound designer. Throughout, the book discusses the optimizations and performance enhancements that enable your game to run while maintaining 60 frames per second.
Explores the basics of indie game marketing Helps the reader with how to communicate to talk to investors, pbulishers, and major platforms Illustrates different negotiation tactics
Combining theory and practice, this updated new edition provides a complete overview of how to create deep and meaningful quests for games. It uses the Unity game engine in conjunction with Fungus and other free plugins to provide an accessible entry into quest design. The book begins with an introduction to the theory and history of quests in games, before covering four theoretical components of quests: their spaces, objects, actors, and challenges. Each chapter also includes a practical section, with accompanying exercises and suggestions for the use of specific technologies for four crucial aspects of quest design: * level design * quest item creation * NPC and dialogue construction * scripting This book will be of great interest to all game designers looking to create new, innovative quests in their games. It will also appeal to new media researchers, as well as humanities scholars in the fields of mythology and depth-psychology that want to bring computer-assisted instruction into their classroom in an innovative way. The companion website includes lecture and workshop slides, and can be accessed at: www.designingquests.com
A mysterious group of phantom thieves skulks in the shadows of Tokyo, changing the hearts of corrupt adults. But behind their masks are... normal teenagers and a talking black cat?! PERSONA 5: MEMENTOS MISSION is an all-new mystery featuring the cast of PERSONA 5. IN THIS VOLUME: The attempted poisoning of an influential CEO... Suspicious happenings at a local doctor's clinic... Sketchy job requests at a back-street military shop... High schooler and phantom thieves leader Ren Amamiya tackles these mysterious incidents together with his trustworthy friends and the famous high school detective Goro Akechi!
Fully detailed game projects from scratch. Beginners can do the steps and create games right away. No coding experience is necessary. Numerous examples take a raw beginner towards professional coding proficiency in C# and Unity. Includes a thorough introduction to Unity 2020 All required software is professional quality and completely free to use for any purpose including commercial applications and games.
Direct3D 11 offers such a wealth of capabilities that users can sometimes get lost in the details of specific APIs and their implementation. While there is a great deal of low-level information available about how each API function should be used, there is little documentation that shows how best to leverage these capabilities. Written by active members of the Direct3D community, Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 provides a deep understanding of both the high and low level concepts related to using Direct3D 11. The first part of the book presents a conceptual introduction to Direct3D 11, including an overview of the Direct3D 11 rendering and computation pipelines and how they map to the underlying hardware. It also provides a detailed look at all of the major components of the library, covering resources, pipeline details, and multithreaded rendering. Building upon this material, the second part of the text includes detailed examples of how to use Direct3D 11 in common rendering scenarios. The authors describe sample algorithms in-depth and discuss how the features of Direct3D 11 can be used to your advantage. All of the source code from the book is accessible on an actively maintained open source rendering framework. The sample applications and the framework itself can be downloaded from http://hieroglyph3.codeplex.com By analyzing when to use various tools and the tradeoffs between different implementations, this book helps you understand the best way to accomplish a given task and thereby fully leverage the potential capabilities of Direct3D 11. Key Features Presents the high level concepts used to design algorithms Describes the nuts and bolts of how to implement the algorithms Explains each of the major components of the Direct3D 11 library Shows how Direct3D 11 can be used in a variety of real-world situations Provides source code and sample programs on a supplementary website
Told over a series of daily journal logs, One-Week Dungeons: Diaries of a Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge chronicles the journeys of eleven 7DRL participants as they race to build their dream games before the clock expires.
Architecture for the Commons dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design. The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies. This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.
Shareware Heroes is a comprehensive, meticulously researched exploration of an important and too-long overlooked chapter in video game historyShareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet takes readers on a journey, from the beginnings of the shareware model in the early 1980s, the origins of the concept, even the name itself, and the rise of shareware's major players - the likes of id Software, Apogee, and Epic MegaGames - through to the significance of shareware for the 'forgotten' systems - the Mac, Atari ST, Amiga - when commercial game publishers turned away from them.This book also charts the emergence of commercial shareware distributors like Educorp and the BBS/newsgroup sharing culture. And it explores how shareware developers plugged gaps in the video gaming market by creating games in niche and neglected genres like vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-ups (e.g. Raptor and Tyrian) or racing games (e.g. Wacky Wheels and Skunny Kart) or RPGs (God of Thunder and Realmz), until finally, as the video game market again grew and shifted, and major publishers took control, how the shareware system faded into the background and fell from memory.
This is a timely and relevant volume, considering the many manipulations and enhancements upon our ideas of reality in the 21st century The book explores how and why we deny, manipulate, convert, or enhance reality The book argues that examining the many ways in which we manipulate, deny, convert or enhance our realities can give us an idea of how to deal with reality, which in turn can provide us with a blueprint for how to live responsibly The book brings together an international team of contributors to discuss contemporary issues such as fake news, propaganda, virtual reality, theatre as real life and reality TV This book draws on examples from vast fields such as film studies, sociology, the social sciences and medicine This volume will appeal to scholars and upper-level students in the areas of communication and media studies, comparative literature, film studies, economics, English, international affairs, journalism, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theatre |
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