Save the Magaambya! The heroes return to the Magaambya magic academy to find the villain they’d vanquished on a distant planet had set another scheme in motion long ago. Students and teachers have been twisted by evil magic, and the heroes must engage in legendary tests to gain the means to free them. While a monstrous foe thrashes through the Magaambya, it’s up to the heroes to save the school from utter destruction! “Shadows of the Ancients” is a Pathfinder adventure for four 18th-level characters by Saif Ansari. This adventure concludes the Strength of Thousands Adventure Path, a six-part, monthly campaign in which the heroes rise from humble students to influential teachers, and ultimately decide the fate of the Magaambya. This adventure provides guidance to tell stories that are like fables or set in truly unusual adventure locations, and concludes with a look at powerful monsters, magic, and abilities that only the mightiest Magaambyan heroes can claim! Each monthly full-color softcover Pathfinder Adventure Path volume contains an in-depth adventure scenario, stats for several new monsters, and support articles meant to give Game Masters additional material to expand their campaign. Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes use the Open Game License and work with both the Pathfinder RPG and the world’s oldest fantasy RPG.

Games and simulations have emerged as new and effective tools for educational learning by providing interactivity and integration with online resources that are typically unavailable with traditional educational resources. Design, Utilization, and Analysis of Simulations and Game-Based Educational Worlds presents developments and evaluations of games and computer-mediated simulations in order to showcase a better understanding of the role of electronic games in multiple studies. This book is useful for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to gain a deeper comprehension of the relationship between research and practice of electronic gaming and simulations in the educational environment.

The third volume of The Art of Hearthstone chronicles the artistic achievements that infused the Year of the Mammoth with charm, character, and beauty. Through vivid illustrations and behind-the-scenes interviews with artists and game designers, The Art of Hearthstone draws back the curtain to a massive creative undertaking, showing how a huge team came together to deliver one of Hearthstone's most impressive years ever.

As games become increasingly embedded into everyday life, understanding the ethics of their creation and use, as well as their potential for practicing ethical thinking, becomes more relevant. Designing Games for Ethics: Models, Techniques and Frameworks brings together the diverse and growing community of voices and begin to define the field, identify its primary challenges and questions, and establish the current state of the discipline. Such a rigorous, collaborative, and holistic foundation for the study of ethics and games is necessary to appropriately inform future games, policies, standards, and curricula.

This book highlights the challenges and potential of educational learning or industry-based training using serious games and social media platforms. In particular, the book addresses applications used in businesses and education-related organizations in Asia, where the framework and experience of serious games have been used to address specific problems in the real world. The topics that will be present in this book includes future of serious games and immersive technologies and their impact on society; online and mobile games; achievement systems in serious games; persuasive technology and games for saving and money management; malware analytics for social networking; serious games for mental health interventions; educational implications of social network games; learning and acquiring subject knowledge using serious games in classrooms. The target audience for this book includes scientists, engineers and practitioners involved in the field of Serious Games. The major part of this book comprises of papers that have been presented at the Serious Games and Social Connect 2012 conference held in Singapore (October 4, 2012). All the contributions have been peer reviewed and by scientific committee members with report about quality, content and originality.

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.

For the first time, the collected texts from the critically and commercially acclaimed fantasy video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are bound together in three exciting volumes. Lavishly illustrated and produced, these titles are straight out of the world of Skyrim - and a must for any wandering adventurer.

For over 25 years, World of Warcraft has offered a land rich in mystery and wonder. Now players can get an in-depth look at the artifacts, gear, weaponry, and trinkets they have collected...and some they might not have just yet . With exquisite art and a brand new story, this book covers the continent of the Eastern Kingdom, from Stormwind to Stranglethorn, plaguelands to palaces, and all the lands in between.

As this comprehensive and multi-disciplinary anthology makes clear, virtuality has a pedigree that pre-dates the computer age and modern virtual worlds, a pedigree that can be traced back to classical mythology and beyond. Equally, the concept of virtuality is not the province of one field of study alone but is the foundation and driving force of many, both theoretical and applied. Our conceptualizations and applications of virtuality are multiple, as is shown across the nine sections of the book that move from philosophy to technologies and applications before returning to philosophy again for a discussion of the utopias and dystopias of virtuality. The almost 50 essays contained within range freely across subjects that include the potential of virtuality, ethics, virtuality and self, presence and immersion, virtual emotions, image, sound and literature, computer games, AI and A-Life, Augmented Reality and Real Virtuality, law and economics, medical and military applications, religion, and cybersex. Throughout, contributors discuss differences between virtuality, reality, and actuality, in debates filtered through the lenses of the disciplines represented here, and speculate on future directions. It is not at all clear that there are differences and, if such distinctions are to be found, the boundaries between virtuality, reality, and actuality continually shift as ideas, modes of organization, and behaviors constantly flow from one to the other regardless of direction. The Handbook presents no unified definition of virtuality to comfort the reader, rather a multiplicity of questions and approaches underpinned by provocative statements that should further fuel the debates surrounding our notions of virtuality.

Welcome to the second volume of Game Audio Programming: Principles and Practices - the first series of its kind dedicated to the art of game audio programming! This volume features more than 20 chapters containing advanced techniques from some of the top game audio programmers and sound designers in the industry. This book continues the tradition of collecting more knowledge and wisdom about game audio programming than any other volume in history. Both audio programming beginners and seasoned veterans will find content in this book that is valuable, with topics ranging from extreme low-level mixing to high-level game integration. Each chapter contains techniques that were used in games that have shipped, and there is a plethora of code samples and diagrams. There are chapters on threading, DSP implementation, advanced middleware techniques in FMOD Studio and Audiokinetic Wwise, ambiences, mixing, music, and more. This book has something for everyone who is programming audio for a game: programmers new to the art of audio programming, experienced audio programmers, and those souls who just got assigned the audio code. This book is for you!

Featuring stunning concept art and visual details, this is the second volume of artwork of Blizzard's Hearthstone game. Something stirs in the dark... The second volume of The Art of Hearthstone dives deep into the depths of the Year of the Kraken, the first year of Hearthstone's standard format. Consisting of hundreds of illustrations from the corruptive cults of Whispers of the Old Gods, the glamourous disco of One Night in Karazhan, and the turf wars of Means Streets of Gadgetzan, this book goes into detail about the Hearthstone team's artistic process for card art, game boards, and other visual designs, while also exploring the challenges and triumphs of creating a game enjoyed by millions upon millions of players around the globe.

This book looks closely at the endings of narrative digital games, examining their ways of concluding the processes of both storytelling and play in order to gain insight into what endings are and how we identify them in different media. While narrative digital games share many representational strategies for signalling their upcoming end with more traditional narrative media - such as novels or movies - they also show many forms of endings that often radically differ from our conventional understanding of conclusion and closure. From vast game worlds that remain open for play after a story's finale, to multiple endings that are often hailed as a means for players to create their own stories, to the potentially tragic endings of failure and "game over", digital games question the traditional singularity and finality of endings. Using a broad range of examples, this book delves deeply into these and other forms and their functions, both to reveal the closural specificities of the ludonarrative hybrid that digital games are, as well as to find the core elements that characterise endings in any medium. It examines how endings make themselves known to players and raises the question of how well-established closural conventions blend with play and a player's effort to achieve a goal. As an interdisciplinary study that draws on game studies as much as on transmedial narratology, Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games is suited for scholars and students of digital games as well as for narratologists yet to become familiar with this medium.

What happens when a group of people see things that others do not and begin acting accordingly? The Augmented Reality of Pokemon GO: Chronotopes, Moral Panic, and Other Complexities explores this question by examining what happened after Pokemon GO, a smartphone augmented reality game, was released in July, 2016. The game overlaid the world of Pokemon onto the "real" physical world, drawing 30 million players in the first two weeks. Pokemon GO has created new ways of sensing the environment, reading things around us, walking the street, and dwelling in certain areas, i.e., inhabiting the world. Through detailed text analyses of the game and auto-ethnographies of the contributing authors' experiences playing the game analyzed from anthropological perspectives, this volume provides nuanced analyses of this new way of relating to the world: the augmented reality world of Pokemon GO. Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of this new experience of the world: the cosmology of the world of Pokemon and the multifaceted ways we relate to our environment through Pokemon GO; the notion of space and time in Pokemon GO and its interface with that of real world as it guides our actions; the phenomenology of Pokemon GO in urban walking with its complex relationships to public space, "nature" as constructed through modernity, cell phone infrastructure, and urban landscapes where insects, animals, birds, human, history, transportation infrastructure, and trash all intermingle to create its ambiance; and the game's link to the wider social issue as it gets appropriated for "friendly authoritarian" goals of civil society, imposing various ideologies and accruing commercial gains. Through "participant observation" -all contributors have been avid Pokemon GO players themselves-this volume offers snapshots of the Pokemon GO effect from its initial stage as a social phenomenon to Spring 2018.

Create your first 2D, 3D, and AR/VR games with the awesome Unity game platform. With this hands-on beginner's guide, you'll start building games fast! In Unity in Action, Third Edition, you will learn how to: Create characters that run, jump, and bump into things Build 3D first-person shooters and third-person action games Construct 2D card games and side-scrolling platformers Script enemies with AI Improve game graphics by importing models and images Design an intuitive user interface for your games Play music and spatially-aware sound effects Connect your games to the internet for online play Deploy your games to desktop, mobile, and the web Thousands of new game developers have chosen Joe Hocking's Unity in Action as their first step toward Unity mastery. This fully updated third edition comes packed with fully refreshed graphics, Unity's latest features, and coverage of the augmented and virtual reality toolkits. Using your existing coding skills, you'll write custom code instead of just clicking together premade scripts. You'll master the Unity toolset from the ground up, adding the skills you need to go from application coder to game developer. Build your next game without sweating the low-level details. The Unity game engine handles the heavy lifting, so you can focus on game play, graphics, and user experience. With support for C#, a huge ecosystem of production-quality prebuilt assets, and a strong dev community, Unity will get your game idea off the drawing board and onto the screen! You can even use Unity for more than game development, with new tools for VR and augmented reality that are perfect for developing useful apps.

This book presents the most up-to-date coverage of procedural content generation (PCG) for games, specifically the procedural generation of levels, landscapes, items, rules, quests, or other types of content. Each chapter explains an algorithm type or domain, including fractal methods, grammar-based methods, search-based and evolutionary methods, constraint-based methods, and narrative, terrain, and dungeon generation. The authors are active academic researchers and game developers, and the book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students of courses on games and creativity; game developers who want to learn new methods for content generation; and researchers in related areas of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence.

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

From security training simulations to war games to role-playing games, to sports games to gambling, playing video games has become a social phenomena, and the increasing number of players that cross gender, culture, and age is on a dramatic upward trajectory. "Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences" integrates communication, psychology, and technology to examine the psychological and mediated aspects of playing video games. It is the first volume to delve deeply into these aspects of computer game play. It fits squarely into the media psychology arm of entertainment studies, the next big wave in media studies. The book targets one of the most popular and pervasive media in modern times, and it will serve to define the area of study and provide a theoretical spine for future research.
This unique and timely volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in media studies and mass communication, psychology, and marketing.

Let the iconic, retro-futuristic wasteland guide your tarot practice with this beautifully illustrated deck inspired by the massively popular Fallout franchise. Featuring deluxe custom artwork of iconic figures from the beloved Fallout franchise, this deck is a great way to enjoy the characters and lore of this popular video game. Containing both major and minor arcana, the set also comes with a comprehensive guidebook explaining each card's meaning, as well as simple spreads for easy readings. Packed in a sturdy, decorative gift box, this compelling tarot deck is perfect for Fallout fans and tarot enthusiasts alike.

Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.

This book will provide a comprehensive guide to creating and managing a game jam. The book will also provide an overview of how and where game jams have been held, the type of game jams, the tools and technologies used in organising and participating in game jams.

This book is a theoretical and practical deep dive into the craft of worldbuilding for video games, with an explicit focus on how different job disciplines contribute to worldbuilding. In addition to providing lenses for recognizing the various components in creating fictional and digital worlds, the author positions worldbuilding as a reciprocal and dynamic process, a process which acknowledges that worldbuilding is both created by and instrumental in the design of narrative, gameplay, art, audio, and more. Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games encourages mutual respect and collaboration among teams and provides game writers and narrative designers tools for effectively incorporating other job roles into their own worldbuilding practice and vice versa. Features: Provides in-depth exploration of worldbuilding via respective job disciplines Deep dives and case studies into a variety of games, both AAA and indie Includes boxed articles for deeper interrogation and exploration of key ideas Contains templates and checklists for practical tips on worldbuilding

Within the field of game design, game balance can best be described as a black art. It is the process by which game designers make a game simultaneously fair for players while providing them just the right amount of difficulty to be both exciting and challenging without making the game entirely predictable. This involves a combination of mathematics, psychology, and occasionally other fields such as economics and game theory. Game Balance offers readers a dynamic look into game design and player theory. Throughout the book, relevant topics on the use of spreadsheet programs will be included in each chapter. This book therefore doubles as a useful reference on Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets, and other spreadsheet programs and their uses for game designers. FEATURES The first and only book to explore game balance as a topic in depth Topics range from intermediate to advanced, while written in an accessible style that demystifies even the most challenging mathematical concepts to the point where a novice student of game design can understand and apply them Contains powerful spreadsheet techniques which have been tested with all major spreadsheet programs and battle-tested with real-world game design tasks Provides short-form exercises at the end of each chapter to allow for practice of the techniques discussed therein along with three long-term projects divided into parts throughout the book that involve their creation Written by award-winning designers with decades of experience in the field Ian Schreiber has been in the industry since 2000, first as a programmer and then as a game designer. He has worked on eight published game titles, training/simulation games for three Fortune 500 companies, and has advised countless student projects. He is the co-founder of Global Game Jam, the largest in-person game jam event in the world. Ian has taught game design and development courses at a variety of colleges and universities since 2006. Brenda Romero is a BAFTA award-winning game director, entrepreneur, artist, and Fulbright award recipient and is presently game director and creator of the Empire of Sin franchise. As a game director, she has worked on 50 games and contributed to many seminal titles, including the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series and titles in the Ghost Recon, Dungeons & Dragons, and Def Jam franchises.