Corona SDK is one of the most powerful tools used to create games and apps for mobile devices. The market requires speed; new developers need to operate quickly and efficiently. Create 2D Mobile Games with Corona SDK gives you the tools needed to master Corona - even within the framework of professional constraints. A must-read guide, this book gives you fast, accurate tips to learn the programming language necessary to create games. Read it sequentially or as an FAQ and you will have the tools you need to create any base game before moving on to advanced topics. The tutorial-based format: Contains step-by-step directions complete with coding and screenshots Is filled with tutorials, tips, and links to useful online resources Includes a comprehensive companion website featuring online exercise files to practice coding, full build samples from the text, additional book details, and more!

This book is written by a professional instructor and founder of CartoonSmart.com, a company specializing in new media tutorials for nearly a decade. The book is a start-to-finish guide for anyone looking to begin iOS development using Cocos2d and Xcode and submit their finished app to Apple. Even if you haven't read code before, you can begin with this book. This book is a handy reference guide, with easy to look-up sections of code snippets, pictures and links to video examples. Features: Code Video examples 5 hours of tutorial videos on Box2d, which can take the reader even further beyond what they learned in the book

The Essential Guide to Game Audio: The Theory and Practice of Sound for Games is a first of its kind textbook and must-have reference guide for everything you ever wanted to know about sound for games. This book provides a basic overview of game audio, how it has developed over time, and how you can make a career in this industry. Each chapter gives you the background and context you will need to understand the unique workflow associated with interactive media. The practical, easy to understand interactive examples provide hands-on experience applying the concepts in real world situations.

Holistic Mobile Game Development with Unity: An All-In-One Guide to Implementing Mechanics, Art Design and Programming for iOS and Android Games Master mobile game design and development in this all-in-one guide to creating iOS and Android games in the cutting-edge game engine, Unity. By using Penny de Byl s holistic method, you will learn about the principles of art, design, and code and gain multidisciplinary skills needed to succeed in the independent mobile games industry. In addition, hands-on exercises will help you throughout the process from design to publication in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Over 70 practical step-by-step exercises recreating the game mechanics of contemporary mobile games, including Angry Birds, Temple Run, Year Walk, Minecraft, Curiosity Cube, Fruit Ninja, and more. Design principles, art, and programming in unison the one-stop shop for indie developers requiring interdisciplinary skills in their small teams. An introduction to essential two- and three-dimensional mathematics, geometry and physics concepts. A portfolio of royalty free reusable game mechanics and assets. Accompanying website, www.holistic3d.com, features project source code, instructional videos, art assets, author blog, and teaching resources. Challenge questions and lesson plans are available online for an enhanced learning experience.

Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game's design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games.

In this book, veteran game developers, academics, journalists, and others provide their processes and experiences with level design. Each provides a unique perspective representing multiple steps of the process for interacting with and creating game levels - experiencing levels, designing levels, constructing levels, and testing levels. These diverse perspectives offer readers a window into the thought processes that result in memorable open game worlds, chilling horror environments, computer-generated levels, evocative soundscapes, and many other types of gamespaces. This collection invites readers into the minds of professional designers as they work and provides evergreen topics on level design and game criticism to inspire both new and veteran designers. Key Features: Learn about the processes of experienced developers and level designers in their own words Discover best-practices for creating levels for persuasive play and designing collaboratively Offers analysis methods for better understanding game worlds and how they function in response to gameplay Find your own preferred method of level design by learning the processes of multiple industry veterans

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) has emerged as a solution for flexible, application-specific optimization of embedded systems. Helping you understand the issues involved in designing and constructing embedded systems, Design of Low-Power Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures offers new frameworks for optimizing the architecture of components in embedded systems in order to decrease area and save power. Real application benchmarks and gate-level simulations substantiate these frameworks. The first half of the book explains how to reduce power in the configuration cache. The authors present a low-power reconfiguration technique based on reusable context pipelining that merges the concept of context reuse into context pipelining. They also propose dynamic context compression capable of supporting required bits of the context words set to enable and the redundant bits set to disable. In addition, they discuss dynamic context management for reducing power consumption in the configuration cache by controlling a read/write operation of the redundant context words. Focusing on the design of a cost-effective processing element array to reduce area and power consumption, the second half of the text presents a cost-effective array fabric that uniquely rearranges processing elements and their interconnection designs. The book also describes hierarchical reconfigurable computing arrays consisting of two reconfigurable computing blocks with two types of communication structure. The two computing blocks share critical resources, offering an efficient communication interface between them and reducing the overall area. The final chapter takes an integrated approach to optimization that draws on the design schemes presented in earlier chapters. Using a case study, the authors demonstrate the synergy effect of combining multiple design schemes.

Taking as its point of departure the fundamental observation that games are both technical and symbolic, this collection investigates the multiple intersections between the study of computer games and the discipline of technical and professional writing. Divided into five parts, Computer Games and Technical Communication engages with questions related to workplace communities and gamic simulations; industry documentation; manuals, gameplay, and ethics; training, testing, and number crunching; and the work of games and gamifying work. In that computer games rely on a complex combination of written, verbal, visual, algorithmic, audio, and kinesthetic means to convey information, technical and professional writing scholars are uniquely poised to investigate the intersection between the technical and symbolic aspects of the computer game complex. The contributors to this volume bring to bear the analytic tools of the field to interpret the roles of communication, production, and consumption in this increasingly ubiquitous technical and symbolic medium.

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

From gaming consoles to smartphones, video games are everywhere today, including those set in historical times and particularly in the ancient world. This volume explores the varied depictions of the ancient world in video games and demonstrates the potential challenges of games for scholars as well as the applications of game engines for educational and academic purposes. With successful series such as "Assassin's Creed" or "Civilization" selling millions of copies, video games rival even television and cinema in their role in shaping younger audiences' perceptions of the past. Yet classical scholarship, though embracing other popular media as areas of research, has so far largely ignored video games as a vehicle of classical reception. This collection of essays fills this gap with a dedicated study of receptions, remediations and representations of Classical Antiquity across all electronic gaming platforms and genres. It presents cutting-edge research in classics and classical receptions, game studies and archaeogaming, adopting different perspectives and combining papers from scholars, gamers, game developers and historical consultants. In doing so, it delivers the first state-of-the-art account of both the wide array of 'ancient' video games, as well as the challenges and rewards of this new and exciting field.

The last several years have seen mass uprisings and dynamic social movements across the globe, from the onset of the Arab Spring in 2011, to the Black Lives Matter movement following Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. There is no doubt that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter accelerated and facilitated these uprisings, providing a way for people to organize and express themselves despite government repression. From Tahrir Square to Ferguson: Social Networks as Facilitators of Social Movements attempts to answer the question of whether these movements could have succeeded before the advent of the Internet age. From political protest to regime change, social movements have become increasingly digital. Taking on the current political climate from an international perspective, From Tahrir Square to Ferguson: Social Networks as Facilitators of Social Movements attempts to address the issues of a growing social media audience facing a wide variety of social and political issues.

"Fundamentally, making games is designing with others, everyone contributing from different angles towards the best possible product. Conclusively, Garcia-Ruiz has chosen a collection of chapters that demonstrates several different aspects of working in gaming and working with others that stands to raise the level of expertise in the field." -Veronica Zammitto, Senior Lead Games User Research, Electronic Arts, Inc., from the Foreword Usability is about making a product easy to use while meeting the requirements of target users. Applied to video games, this means making the game accessible and enjoyable to the player. Video games with high usability are generally played efficiently and frequently while enjoying higher sales volumes. The case studies in this book present the latest interdisciplinary research and applications of games user research in determining and developing usability to improve the video game user experience at the human-computer interface level. Some of the areas examined include practical and ethical concerns in conducting usability testing with children, audio experiences in games, tangible and graphical game interfaces, controller testing, and business models in mobile gaming. Games User Research: A Case Study Approach provides a highly useful resource for researchers, practitioners, lecturers, and students in developing and applying methods for testing player usability as well as for conducting games user research. It gives the necessary theoretical and practical background for designing and conducting a test for usability with an eye toward modifying software interfaces to improve human-computer interaction between the player and the game.

The growth in popularity and complexity of video games has spurred new interest in how games are developed and in the research and technology behind them. David Heineman brings together some of the most iconic, influential, and interesting voices from across the gaming industry and asks them to weigh in on the past, present, and future of video games. Among them are legendary game designers Nolan Bushnell (Pong) and Eugene Jarvis (Defender), who talk about their history of innovations from the earliest days of the video game industry through to the present; contemporary trailblazers Kellee Santiago (Journey) and Casey Hudson (Mass Effect), who discuss contemporary relationships between those who create games and those who play them; and scholars Ian Bogost (How to Do Things With Videogames) and Edward Castronova (Exodus to the Virtual World), who discuss how to research and write about games in ways that engage a range of audiences. These experts and others offer fascinating perspectives on video games, game studies, gaming culture, and the game industry more broadly.

While formal training and communication are a foundational approach to developing employees in the workplace, alternate reality games (ARGs) provide a framework for increased and sustained engagement within business organizations. ARGs are transmedia experiences designed to generate engagement and immersive learning beyond what is achieved in formal and conventional training and communication approaches. Alternate Reality Games: Gamification for Performance leads you through the fundamentals of ARGs. It includes a discussion of what is and is not an ARG, citing examples and identifying business challenges that can be addressed through ARGs. It presents case studies that illustrate the variety of forms that ARGs take and the issues to which they can be applied, such as improving performance and critical communication situations. It also gives guidelines for creating your own ARGs, reviewing the process and technological tools and considerations relevant to their creation. Presenting a thorough examination of the beneficial roles ARGs can play in the business environment as well as methods for creating effective ARGs, Alternate Reality Games: Gamification for Performance is an ideal reference for those approaching or considering ARGs for the first time as well as the training professional or professional game designer. It presents a comprehensive overview of the advantages of applying ARGs to the workplace as well as methods for designing and using them.

Imagine a time in the not too distant future when not only game companies but also the human resources, marketing and product development divisions of major corporations are hiring game designers. The time is coming when companies large and small, creative agencies, school systems, museums, libraries and public and governmental institutions will employ game designers to engage employees, customers, students and volunteers to generate new audiences and deepen commitments. The skills that a game designer brings, organizing and presenting a body of information in the most appropriate and entertaining way, are the ones needed by the twenty-first century organization. Designing Gamified Systems is a practical guide for practicing and aspiring game designers to put their unique and valuable skills to work to drive engagement, build motivation, and facilitate positive behavior.

Rather than the overused ideas of pervasive games or "gamification," this book uniquely focuses first and foremost on the partnership between the content expert or client and the game designer. It assumes that game systems are one more meaningful tool that can now be used to help organizations and individuals encourage people to care about them and support them. Providing a solid introduction to the fundamental principles of the game layer, it also offers a practical set of tools and activities to contextualize the practice within a variety of different scenarios. It includes interviews with industry leaders, content experts, game designers, museum professionals, and educators who are all using game practices and ideas in new and innovative ways. Catching a snapshot of this exciting moment while delivering enduring fundamentals, the book can be used in the classroom or can be read as a trade book, and will appeal to industry professionals, game designers and game design students."

This book explains how designing, playing and modifying computer games, and understanding the theory behind them, can strengthen the area of digital humanities. This book aims to help digital humanities scholars understand both the issues and also advantages of game design, as well as encouraging them to extend the field of computer game studies, particularly in their teaching and research in the field of virtual heritage. By looking at re-occurring issues in the design, playtesting and interface of serious games and game-based learning for cultural heritage and interactive history, this book highlights the importance of visualisation and self-learning in game studies and how this can intersect with digital humanities. It also asks whether such theoretical concepts can be applied to practical learning situations. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to investigate how games and virtual environments can be used in teaching and research to critique issues and topics in the humanities, particularly in virtual heritage and interactive history.

Computer games represent a significant software application domain for innovative research in software engineering techniques and technologies. Game developers, whether focusing on entertainment-market opportunities or game-based applications in non-entertainment domains, thus share a common interest with software engineers and developers on how to best engineer game software. Featuring contributions from leading experts in software engineering, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to computer game software development that includes its history as well as emerging research on the interaction between these two traditionally distinct fields. An ideal reference for software engineers, developers, and researchers, this book explores game programming and development from a software engineering perspective. It introduces the latest research in computer game software engineering (CGSE) and covers topics such as HALO (Highly Addictive, sociaLly Optimized) software engineering, multi-player outdoor smartphone games, gamifying sports software, and artificial intelligence in games. The book explores the use of games in software engineering education extensively. It also covers game software requirements engineering, game software architecture and design approaches, game software testing and usability assessment, game development frameworks and reusability techniques, and game scalability infrastructure, including support for mobile devices and web-based services.

This book offers insight into one of the most problematic and universal issues within multiplayer videogames: antisocial and oppositional play forms such as cheating, player harassment, the use of exploits, illicit game modifications, and system hacking, known collectively as counterplay. Using ethnographic research, Alan Meades not only to gives voice to counterplayers, but reframes counterplay as a complex practice with contradictory motivations that is anything but reducible to simply being hostile to play, players, or commercial videogames. The book offers a grounded and pragmatic exploration of counterplay, framing it as an unavoidable by-product of interaction of mass audiences with compelling and culturally important texts.

Gambling is both a multi-billion dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and 'agile'. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of 'problem gambling' in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including anthropology, history and media studies to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technology, the gambling industry, and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalizing technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; globalization, and the rise of games, virtual worlds, and social media.

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

As science becomes increasingly computational, the limits of what is computationally tractable become a barrier to scientific progress. Many scientific problems, however, are amenable to human problem solving skills that complement computational power. By leveraging these skills on a larger scale - beyond the relatively few individuals currently engaged in scientific inquiry - there is the potential for new scientific discoveries. This book presents a framework for mapping open scientific problems into video games. The game framework combines computational power with human problem solving and creativity to work toward solving scientific problems that neither computers nor humans could previously solve alone. To maximize the potential contributors to scientific discovery, the framework designs a game to be played by people with no formal scientific background and incentivizes long- term engagement with a myriad of collaborative on competitive reward structures. The framework allows for the continual coevolution of the players and the game to each other: as players gain expertise through gameplay, the game changes to become a better tool. The framework is validated by being applied to proteomics problems with the video game Foldit. Foldit players have contributed to novel discoveries in protein structure prediction, protein design, and protein structure refinement algorithms. The coevolution of human problem solving and computer tools in an incentivized game framework is an exciting new scientific pathway that can lead to discoveries currently unreachable by other methods.

Most tools developers want to improve the user experience but are not given the time, lack the techniques, or don't know where to begin.Designing the User Experience of Game Development Tools addresses these issues to empower tools developers to make positive steps toward improving the user experience of their tools. The book explains how to improve the user experience of game development tools. The first part of the book details the logic behind why the user experience of game tools must be improved. The second part introduces the concept of user-centered design, a process that revolves around understanding people's goals, watching them work, learning the context in which they work, and understanding how they think. Ideal for anyone who makes, uses, or benefits from game development tools, the book presents complex concepts in a manner that is accessible to those new to user experience design. The book illustrates many proven concepts and techniques using before-and-after examples from tools development to supply you with the real-world understanding you need to become a better game developer. It also describes how to get buy-in from your team. Although concepts have been simplified to make the information more easily accessible, the text includes resources in the footnotes if you want more details. The book includes access to a companion website, www.UXofGameTools.com, that contains the latest revisions for the book as well as contact information. You can also follow the official Twitter account @UXofGameTools to see the latest updates and articles related to the improvement of the user experience.

This book introduces the basics in game usability and overall game UX mindset and techniques, as well as looking at current industry best practices and trends. Fully updated for its second edition, it includes practical advice on how to include usability in already tight development timelines, and how to advocate for UX and communicate results to higher-ups effectively. The book begins with an introduction to UX strategy considerations for games, and to UX design, before moving on to cover core user research and usability techniques as well as how to fit UX practices into the business process. It provides considerations of player differences and offers strategies for inclusion as well as chapters that give platform and context specific advice. With a wealth of new interviews with industry leaders and contributions from the very best in game UX, the book also includes brand new chapters on: Accessibility Mobile Game Usability Data Science Virtual and Augmented Reality Esports This book will be vital reading for all professional game developers and game UX advocates, as well as those students aspiring to work in game development and game UX.

This is the first of two comprehensive volumes that provide a thorough and multi-faceted research into the emerging field of augmented reality games and consider a wide range of its major issues. These first ever research monographs on augmented reality games have been written by a team of 70 leading researchers, practitioners and artists from 20 countries. In Volume I, the phenomenon of the Pokemon GO game is analysed in theoretical, cultural and conceptual contexts, with emphasis on its nature and the educational use of the game in children and adolescents. Game transfer phenomena, motives for playing Pokemon GO, players' experiences and memorable moments, social interaction, long-term engagement, health implications and many other issues raised by the Pokemon GO game are systematically examined and discussed. Augmented Reality Games I is essential reading not only for researchers, practitioners, game developers and artists, but also for students (graduates and undergraduates) and all those interested in the rapidly developing area of augmented reality games.