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.

- Highly accessible and code-free introduction to game audio, suitable for a wide range of undergraduate courses, such as music production, sound design and composition - Accompanied by eresources, including downloadable projects for each chapter - A great addition to our growing catalogue of game audio titles

This book examines how video game mechanics and narratives can teach players skills associated with increased psychological well-being. It integrates research from psychology, education, ludology, media studies, and communication science to demonstrate how game play can teach skills that have long been associated with increased happiness and prolonged life satisfaction, including flexible thinking, openness to experience, self-care, a growth mindset, solution-focused thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-discovery and resilience. The chapters in this volume are written by leading voices in the field of game studies, including researchers from academia, the video gaming industry, and mental health practitioners paving the way in the field of "geek therapy." This book will advance our understanding of the potential of video games to increase our psychological well-being by helping to mitigate depression, anxiety, and stress and foster persistence, self-care, and resilience.

Understanding Game Scoring explores the unique collaboration between gameplay and composition that defines musical scoring for video games. Using an array of case studies reaching back into the canon of classic video games, this book illuminates the musical flexibility, user interactivity and sound programming that make game scoring so different from traditional modes of composition. Mack Enns explores the collaboration between game scorers and players to produce the final score for a game, through case studies of the Nintendo Entertainment System sound hardware configuration, and game scores, including the canonic scores for Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986). This book is recommended reading for students and researchers interested in the composition and production of video game scores, as well as those interested in ludo-musicology.

This book offers a comprehensive and detailed guide to accomplishing and perfecting a photorealistic look in digital content across visual effects, architectural and product visualization, and games. Emmy award-winning VFX supervisor Eran Dinur offers readers a deeper understanding of the complex interplay of light, surfaces, atmospherics, and optical effects, and then discusses techniques to achieve this complexity in the digital realm, covering both 3D and 2D methodologies. In addition, the book features artwork, case studies, and interviews with leading artists in the fields of VFX, visualization, and games. Exploring color, integration, light and surface behaviour, atmospherics, shading, texturing, physically-based rendering, procedural modelling, compositing, matte painting, lens/camera effects, and much more, Dinur offers a compelling, elegant guide to achieving photorealism in digital media and creating imagery that is seamless from real footage. Its broad perspective makes this detailed guide suitable for VFX, visualization and game artists and students, as well as directors, architects, designers, and anyone who strives to achieve convincing, believable visuals in digital media.

Game Dev Stories: Interviews About Game Development and Culture Volumes 1 and 2 are a collection of interviews from renowned author David L. Craddock as he explores all corners of the video game industry. Collected from the author's archives, Game Dev Stories gathers conversations with individuals from all corners of the industry: Who they are, the paths they paved, and their contributions to this multibillion-dollar industry. This text offers viewpoints from well-known individuals like John Romero, Tom Hall, and Matt Householder. From artists and writers to programmers and designers, Game Dev Stories offers amazing insights and understanding to what occurs behind the screens of your favorite games and may help inspire future game developers in pursuing their dreams.

Game Dev Stories: Interviews About Game Development and Culture Volumes 1 and 2 are a collection of interviews from renowned author David L. Craddock as he explores all corners of the video game industry. Collected from the author's archives, Game Dev Stories gathers conversations with individuals from all corners of the industry: Who they are, the paths they paved, and their contributions to this multibillion-dollar industry. This text offers viewpoints from well-known individuals like John Romero, Tom Hall, and Matt Householder. From artists and writers to programmers and designers, Game Dev Stories offers amazing insights and understanding to what occurs behind the screens of your favorite games and may help inspire future game developers in pursuing their dreams.

Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as 'cultural software' that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of democratization to draw users into its 'circuits of cultural software'. For scholars of media production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.

Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world's most popular video games, including Sid Meier's Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier's Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multi-million-pound industry. Writing with warmth and ironic humour, Meier describes the genesis of his influential studio, MicroProse, founded in 1982 after a trip to a Las Vegas arcade, and recounts the development of landmark games, from vintage classics like Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, to Civilization and beyond. Articulating his philosophy that a videogame should be "a series of interesting decisions", Meier also shares his perspective on the history of the industry, the psychology of gamers and fascinating insights into the creative process, including his ten rules of good game design.

This tutorial-based book allows readers to create a first-person game from start to finish using industry-standard (and free to student) tools of Unity, Substance Painter, and Maya. The first half of the book lays out the basics of using Maya and Substance Painter to create game-ready assets. This includes polygonal modeling, UV layout, and custom texture painting. The book then covers rigging and animation solutions to create assets to be placed in the game, including animated first-person assets and motion-captured NPC animations. Finally, readers can put it all together and build interactivity that allows the player to create a finished game using the assets built and animated earlier in the book. * Written by industry professionals with real-world experience in building assets and games * Build a complete game from start to finish * Learn what the pros use: construct all assets using the tools used at game studios across the world * All software used are free to students * When complete, students will have a playable version of an FPS game Jingtian Li is a graduate of China's Central Academy of Fine Arts and New York's School of Visual Arts, where he earned an MFA in Computer Art. He currently is an Assistant Professor of 3D Animation & Game Design at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. Adam Watkins is a 20-year veteran of 3D education. He holds an MFA in 3D Animation and a BFA in Theatre Arts from Utah State University. He currently is the Coordinator and Professor of the 3D Animation & Game Department at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. Kassandra Arevalo is an instructor of 3D Animation & Game Design at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. She previously worked as an animator at Immersed Games. Matt Tovar is an industry veteran animator. He has worked at Naughty Dog, Infinity Ward, and Sony Interactive on such games as The Last of Us, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and most recently Marvel's Avengers with Crystal Dynamics. He is an Assistant Professor of 3D Animation at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas.

As games grow more complex and gamers' expectations soar, the discipline of game systems design becomes ever more important. Game systems designers plan a game's rules and balance, its characters' attributes, most of its data, and how its AI, weapons, and objects work and interact. Introduction to Game Systems Design is the first complete beginner's guide to this crucial discipline. Writing for all aspiring game professionals, even those with absolutely no experience, leading game designer and instructor Dax Gazaway presents a step-by-step, hands-on approach to designing game systems with industry-standard tools. Drawing on his experience building AAA-level game systems (including games in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises), Gazaway covers all this, and more: Exploring the essentials of game design and its emerging subdisciplines Asking the essential questions at the heart of all design Getting started with modern game system design tools, including the spreadsheets most professionals now use Creating systems and data from a blank page Populating and quantifying a world of data into a game Tuning and balancing game systems Testing game systems and data Leveraging communication, psychology, and rewards within your games Balancing game probability within systems Whether you're a college freshman entering a game design program, an indie developer using Unreal or Unity, a Dungeon Master, or anyone who wants to really understand modern games, this guide will help you get where you want to go.

Implementing physical simulations for real-time games is a complex task that requires a solid understanding of a wide range of concepts from the fields of mathematics, physics, and software engineering. This book is a gems-like collection of practical articles in the area of game physics. Each provides hands-on detail that can be used in practical applications.

The chapters cover topics such as collision detection, particle-based simulations, constraint solving, and soft-body simulation. An introductory section provides the mathematical foundations and offers some background for the problems inherent in successful physics simulation. The contributors write based on their experience in developing tools and runtime libraries either in game companies or middleware houses that produce physics software for games on PCs and consoles.

In this compelling book, Graeme Kirkpatrick argues that computer games have fundamentally altered the relation of self and society in the digital age. Tracing the origins of gaming to the revival of play in the 1960s counter culture, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary describes how the energies of that movement transformed computer technology from something ugly and machine-like into a world of colour and fun'. In the process, play with computers became computer gaming a new cultural practice with its own values. From the late 1980s gaming became a resource for people to draw upon as they faced the challenges of life in a new, globalizing digital economy. Gamer identity furnishes a revivified capitalism with compliant and streamlined' workers, but at times gaming culture also challenges the corporations that control game production. Analysing topics such as the links between technology and power, the formation of gaming culture and the subjective impact of play with computer games, this insightful text will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media, games studies and the information society.

"Studying Videogames" is the first book to look at videogames as media texts. Written specifically for advanced level/undergraduate students it covers a broad range of games, industry contexts, and research findings. The book challenges conventional media-analysis approaches; sets out the history, present, and future of games; and interrogates claims about their "social effects." Featuring student activities, interviews with key players in the industry, and an extended case study of the Grand Theft Auto cycle, "Studying Videogames" seriously engages with this powerful media.

The author takes readers on an in-depth walkthrough of the Torque Game Engine---one of the most popular, powerful, and easy to use game engines available today. With clear explanations of how to use Torque to create your own games and detailed discussions of the engine's inner workings, this book is a must read for any programmer interested in making games for fun or profit. It offers step-by-step examples, detailed system descriptions, in-depth references, practical tips, tricks, and more that provide readers all they need to understand the Torque Game Engine. See the Support page on the author's website for a revision of Chapter 15 (Torque Lighting). Downloadable resources are included with the book.

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.

An addictive thriller from the most sensational new voice in YA fiction. When sixteen-year-old Asha Kennedy discovers her older sister Maya's dead body in their home, her world falls apart. Desperate for answers, and to stay out of the hands of the social services she grew up in, Asha turns to her hacker friends for help. Her search leads her to Zu Tech, the hit games studio where Maya was a lead coder. As Asha begins to unravel the riddle of her death, she realises that the only way to uncover the truth is from the inside. Asha ghosts her old life and infiltrates a Zu Tech eSport tournament as they launch 'SHACKLE', the revolutionary Virtual Reality video game Maya was working on - and which hides a monstrous secret... Perfect for fans of The Hunger Games and A Good Girl's Guide to Murder A guaranteed page turner full of heart, tension and twists you won't see coming! The first book in a major new YA series

"As esports has grown, the need for professional legal representation has grown with it. Justin's Essential Guide to the Business & Law of Esports & Professional Video Gaming provides a great baseline and will help prevent the legal horror stories of esports in the past." Mitch Reames, AdWeek and Esports Insider "Justin's exploration of the business and law side of the esports sector fills a gap of knowledge that is an absolute necessity in truly understanding the esports space." Kevin Hitt, The Esports Observer The Essential Guide to the Business & Law of Esports & Professional Video Gaming covers everything you need to know about the past, present, and future of esports and professional video gaming. The book is written by one of the foremost attorneys and business practitioners in today's esports and professional gaming scene, Justin M. Jacobson, Esq. This guide is meant to provide you with an in-depth look at the business and legal matters associated with the esports world. * Includes coverage of the stakeholders in the esports business "ecosystem," including the talent, the teams, the publishers, and the event organizers. * Explores various legal fields involved with esports, including intellectual property, employment and player unions, business investments and tax "write-offs," immigration and visas, event operation tips, social media and on-stream promotions, and much more. * The most current book on the market, with actual contract provisions modeled on existing major esports player, coach, shoutcaster, and sponsorship agreements. About the Author Justin M. Jacobson, Esq. is an entertainment and esports attorney located in New York City. For the last decade, he has worked with professional athletes, musicians, producers, DJs, record labels, fashion designers, as well as professional gamers, streamers, coaches, on-air talent, and esports organizations. He assists these creative individuals with their contract, copyright, trademark, immigration, tax, and related business, marketing, and legal issues. He is a frequent contributor to many industry publications and has been featured on a variety of entertainment, music, and esports publications and podcasts, including Business Insider, The Esports Observer, Esports Insider, Tunecore, and Sport Techie. Justin has positioned himself as a top esports business professional working with talent in a variety of franchise leagues including the Overwatch League, Overwatch Contenders, and Call of Duty Pro League as well as in many popular competitive titles such as Fortnite, CS:GO, Gears of War, Halo, Super Smash Brothers, Rainbow 6, PUBG, Madden, and FIFA and mobile games such as Brawlhalla, Clash of Clans, and Call of Duty mobile. Previously, he worked with various esports talent agencies as well as in an official capacity on behalf of several esports teams and brands.

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.

An In-Depth, Practical Guide to GPGPU Programming Using Direct3D 11 GPGPU Programming for Games and Science demonstrates how to achieve the following requirements to tackle practical problems in computer science and software engineering: Robustness Accuracy Speed Quality source code that is easily maintained, reusable, and readable The book primarily addresses programming on a graphics processing unit (GPU) while covering some material also relevant to programming on a central processing unit (CPU). It discusses many concepts of general purpose GPU (GPGPU) programming and presents practical examples in game programming and scientific programming. The author first describes numerical issues that arise when computing with floating-point arithmetic, including making trade-offs among robustness, accuracy, and speed. He then shows how single instruction multiple data (SIMD) extensions work on CPUs since GPUs also use SIMD. The core of the book focuses on the GPU from the perspective of Direct3D 11 (D3D11) and the High Level Shading Language (HLSL). This chapter covers drawing 3D objects; vertex, geometry, pixel, and compute shaders; input and output resources for shaders; copying data between CPU and GPU; configuring two or more GPUs to act as one; and IEEE floating-point support on a GPU. The book goes on to explore practical matters of programming a GPU, including code sharing among applications and performing basic tasks on the GPU. Focusing on mathematics, it next discusses vector and matrix algebra, rotations and quaternions, and coordinate systems. The final chapter gives several sample GPGPU applications on relatively advanced topics. Web ResourceAvailable on a supporting website, the author's fully featured Geometric Tools Engine for computing and graphics saves you from having to write a large amount of infrastructure code necessary for even the simplest of applications involving shader programming. The engine provides robust and accurate source code with SIMD when appropriate and GPU versions of algorithms when possible.

This second edition of C# Game Programming Cookbook for Unity 3D expounds upon the first with more details and techniques. With a fresh array of chapters, updated C# code and examples, Jeff W. Murray's book will help the reader understand structured game development in Unity unlike ever before. New to this edition is a step-by-step tutorial for building a 2D infinite runner game from the framework and scripts included in the book. The book contains a flexible and reusable framework in C# suitable for all game types. From game state handling to audio mixers to asynchronous scene loading, the focus of this book is building a reusable structure to take care of many of the most used systems. Improve your game's sound in a dedicated audio chapter covering topics such as audio mixers, fading, and audio ducking effects, or dissect a fully featured racing game with car physics, lap counting, artificial intelligence steering behaviors, and game management. Use this book to guide your way through all the required code and framework to build a multi-level arena blaster game. Features Focuses on programming, structure, and an industry-level, C#-based framework Extensive breakdowns of all the important classes Example projects illustrate and break down common and important Unity C# programming concepts, such as coroutines, singletons, static variables, inheritance, and scriptable objects. Three fully playable example games with source code: a 2D infinite runner, an arena blaster, and an isometric racing game The script library includes a base Game Manager, timed and proximity spawning, save profile manager, weapons control, artificial intelligence controllers (path following, target chasing and line-of-sight patrolling behaviors), user interface Canvas management and fading, car physics controllers, and more. Code and screenshots have been updated with the latest versions of Unity. These updates will help illustrate how to create 2D games and 3D games based on the most up-to-date methods and techniques. Experienced C# programmers will discover ways to structure Unity projects for reusability and scalability. The concepts offered within the book are instrumental to mastering C# and Unity. In his game career spanning more than 20 years, Jeff W. Murray has worked with some of the world's largest brands as a Game Designer, Programmer, and Director. A Unity user for over 14 years, he now works as a consultant and freelancer between developing his own VR games and experiments with Unity.

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.

Important elements of games, movies, and other computer-generated content, shadows are crucial for enhancing realism and providing important visual cues. In recent years, there have been notable improvements in visual quality and speed, making high-quality realistic real-time shadows a reachable goal. Real-Time Shadows is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of real-time shadow techniques. It covers a large variety of different effects, including hard, soft, volumetric, and semi-transparent shadows. The book explains the basics as well as many advanced aspects related to the domain of shadow computation. It presents interactive solutions and practical details on shadow computation. The authors compare various algorithms for creating real-time shadows and illustrate how they are used in different situations. They explore the limitations and failure cases, advantages and disadvantages, and suitability of the algorithms in several applications. Source code, videos, tutorials, and more are available on the book's website www.realtimeshadows.com.

The Meaning of Video Games takes a textual studies approach to an increasingly important form of expression in today's culture. It begins by assuming that video games are meaningful-not just as sociological or economic or cultural evidence, but in their own right, as cultural expressions worthy of scholarly attention. In this way, this book makes a contribution to the study of video games, but it also aims to enrich textual studies. Early video game studies scholars were quick to point out that a game should never be reduced to merely its "story" or narrative content and they rightly insist on the importance of studying games as games. But here Steven E. Jones demonstrates that textual studies-which grows historically out of ancient questions of textual recension, multiple versions, production, reproduction, and reception-can fruitfully be applied to the study of video games. Citing specific examples such as Myst and Lost, Katamari Damacy, Halo, Facade, Nintendo's Wii, and Will Wright's Spore, the book explores the ways in which textual studies concepts-authorial intention, textual variability and performance, the paratext, publishing history and the social text-can shed light on video games as more than formal systems. It treats video games as cultural forms of expression that are received as they are played, out in the world, where their meanings get made.