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Books > Computing & IT > Computer software packages > Computer games
Official art book of the PS5 launch game Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, featuring concept art created during the development of the game. Be greater, be yourself as Miles Morales swings onto the scene in his own video game for the first time. Learning the ropes as Spider-Man in Peter Parker s absence, Miles must find the balance between keeping his new home, Harlem, safe and rising up to take on new challenges and enemies that test his abilities and loyalties to the limit. The creative process of this much-anticipated game is captured in Marvel s Spider-Man: Miles Morales The Art of the Game. This lush, hardback book showcases the remarkable concept art and in-game renderings created by the talented development team creating the game in collaboration with Marvel. Characters, locations, tech, gadgets, Spider suits and much more are presented in all their incredible detail, accompanied by unique insights from the artists and developers behind the game.
Volume 2 of SNES Omnibus is a fun and informative look at ALL the original Super Nintendo games released in the US starting with the letters N-Z. More than 375 games are featured, including such iconic titles as Star Fox, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Tetris Attack, and Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Each game, whether obscure or mainstream, is covered in exhaustive detail. In addition to thorough gameplay descriptions, the book includes reviews, fun facts, historical data, quotes from vintage magazines, and, best of all, nostalgic stories about many of the games from programmers, authors, convention exhibitors, video game store owners, YouTube celebs, and other industry insiders. The book also features more than 2,000 full-color images, including box art, cartridges, screenshots, and vintage ads. Plus, there's a gorgeous centerfold starring your favorite SNES characters.
Written as a collection of notes in Damon Baird's journal, 'The Survivor's Log' will expand on declassified testimony and other facets of the game and serve as an in-universe artefact within the timeline of the series. This firsthand account will chronicle the soldier's experience in a riveting and beautifully illustrated oral history-the events he witnessed and the deterioration of COG society, his decision to take his unit rogue, and stories from the other embers of his cohort.
The ultimate football adventure story from the world's greatest football duo, The F2 When the evil Galaxico aliens steal the game of football from planet Earth, it's up to Jez and Billy (and the help of their trusty time machines) to assemble the greatest team to have ever played the beautiful game in the hope of stealing it back! From the 1958 World Cup Final, to the year 3000, The F2 travel through time and call upon some of heroes of footballs past, present and future to help in their quest to reinstate the joys of playing the game. With cameos from Pele, Steven Gerrard, Cristiano Ronaldo (and his granddaughter from the future, Julia Ronaldo!), this is a wonderful football story of good vs evil!
Learn All the Design & Development Skills You Need to Make Great Games with Unity, the World's Most Popular Professional Game Engine If you want to design and develop games, there is no substitute for strong, hands-on experience with modern techniques and tools. That is exactly what this book provides. Leading instructor and indie game developer Jeremy Gibson Bond covers all three disciplines that you need to succeed: game design theory, rapid iterative prototyping, and practical programming. Building on two previous best-sellers, this Third Edition contains hundreds of improvements across more than 400 new pages, all designed to make it even easier to understand and more useful in modern game development. The five game tutorials have been thoroughly revised and expanded to cover even more best practices for prototyping and development, and all examples now use Unity 2020.3 LTS (Long Term Support), a stable and feature-rich standard for years to come. The new content includes greatly enhanced tutorials, a chapter on Unity's high-performance Data-Oriented Tech Stack (DOTS), new Coding Challenges to help you transition to making your own games from scratch, and tips on next steps after you have finished the book. The revamped website includes playable versions of all example games, plus an exciting new tool that provides immediate feedback on potential errors in your own code. Part I: Game Design and Paper Prototyping Use the Layered Tetrad to understand and design powerful interactive experiences. Explore the core game design practices of paper prototyping, testing, and iteration. Learn effective strategies for staying on track and on schedule. Get tips for finding a rewarding job in today's industry. Part II: Programming C# in Unity Learn C# from the basics through class inheritance, object-oriented programming, and data-oriented design. Part III: Game Prototype Tutorials Implement games across five genres: arcade, casual physics, space shooter, solitaire card game, and top-down adventure game. Each game is designed to be easily extensible into your own projects.Take three games from prototype to "first playable" through new extended tutorial chapters that refi ne the games further than in previous editions of the book. NEW! Part IV: Next Steps Tackle the new, growing library of Coding Challenges, a proven method for transitioning from tutorials to creating your own projects from scratch.Get ideas and resources for new projects to tackle on your own.
Physics is really important to game programmers who need to know how to add physical realism to their games. They need to take into account the laws of physics when creating a simulation or game engine, particularly in 3D computer graphics, for the purpose of making the effects appear more real to the observer or player.The game engine needs to recognize the physical properties of objects that artists create, and combine them with realistic motion. The physics ENGINE is a computer program that you work into your game that simulates Newtonian physics and predict effects under different conditions. In video games, the physics engine uses real-time physics to improve realism. This is the only book in its category to take readers through the process of building a complete game-ready physics engine from scratch. The Cyclone game engine featured in the book was written specifically for this book and has been utilized in iPhone application development and Adobe Flash projects. There is a good deal of master-class level information available, but almost nothing in any format that teaches the basics in a practical way. The second edition includes NEW and/or revised material on collision detection, 2D physics, casual game physics for Flash games, more references, a glossary, and end-of-chapter exercises. The companion website will include the full source code of the Cyclone physics engine, along with example applications that show the physics system in operation.
A host of digital affordances, including reduced cost production tools, open distribution platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity, have engendered the growth of indie games among makers and users, forcing critics to reconsider the question of who makes games and why. Taking seriously this new mode of cultural produciton compells analysts to reconsider the blurred boundaries and relations of makers, users and texts as well as their respective relationship to cultural power and hierarchy. The contributions to Indie Games in the Digital Age consider these questions and examine a series of firms, makers, games and scenes, ranging from giants like Nintendo and Microsoft to grassroots games like Cards Against Humanity and Stardew Valley, to chart more precisely the productive and instructive disruption that this new site of cultural production offers.
- 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.
Today a multinational video game developer, Sega was the first to break Nintendo's grip on the gaming industry, expanding from primarily an arcade game company to become the dominant game console manufacturer in North America. A major part of that success came from the hard work and innovation of its subsidiary, Sega of America, who in a little more than a decade wrested the majority market share from Nintendo and revolutionized how games were made. Drawing on interviews with nearly 100 Sega alumni, this book traces the company's development, revealing previously undocumented areas of game-making history, including Sega's relationship with Tonka, the creation of its internal studios, and major breakthroughs like the Sega Channel and HEAT Network. More than 40 of the company's most influential games are explored in detail.
The Art of Titanfall will take readers on a no-holds barred look at Respawn Entertainment's hugely anticipated multiplayer shooter - featuring exclusive concept and development art, showcasing the all-out warfare between the agile pilots and lethal Titans of the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation and the M-COR militia, as well as the war-torn battlefields found throughout the game.
Choose your faction, pick your weapon, and prepare for an astonishing vision of the world of Azeroth like you've never seen before! Built by best-selling paper engineer Matthew Reinhardt, the World of Warcraft Pop-Up Book brings the most well-loved locations of Warcraft to life, from the classic faction hubs of Ogrimmar and Stormwind, to the battle-scarred lands of Lordaeron and Teldrassil, and even the new capital cities of Kul Tiras and Zandalar! Each page unfolds into an eye-popping treat, depicting iconic locations with brand new art and interactive pieces that you've never seen before. Unfold each individual spread to form a map of Azeroth!
For the first time in print, step into the fantasy world of The Elder Scrolls Online. Tales of Tamriel - Vol. II: The Lore takes readers on adventure throughout the war-torn landscapes and battlefields of Tamriel, featuring a horde of in-game texts and exclusive artwork. Lavishly bound and produced, this series of books is the definitive guide to lore from the Elder Scrolls Online.
This book provides insights into the state of the art of digital cultural heritage using computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, visualization and reconstruction, virtual and augmented reality and serious games. It aims at covering the emergent approaches for digitization and preservation of Cultural Heritage, both in its tangible and intangible facets. Advancements in Digital Cultural Heritage research have been abundant in recent years covering a wide assortment of topics, ranging from visual data acquisition, pre-processing, classification, analysis and synthesis, 3D modelling and reconstruction, semantics and symbolic representation, metadata description, repository and archiving, to new forms of interactive and personalized presentation, visualization and immersive experience provision via advanced computer graphics, interactive virtual and augmented environments, serious games and digital storytelling. Different aspects pertaining to visual computing with regard to tangible (books, images, paintings, manuscripts, uniforms, maps, artefacts, archaeological sites, monuments) and intangible (e.g. dance and performing arts, folklore, theatrical performances) cultural heritage preservation, documentation, protection and promotion are covered, including rendering and procedural modelling of cultural heritage assets, keyword spotting in old documents, drone mapping and airborne photogrammetry, underwater recording and reconstruction, gamification, visitor engagement, animated storytelling, analysis of choreographic patterns, and many more. The book brings together and targets researchers from the domains of computing, engineering, archaeology and the arts, and aims at underscoring the potential for cross-fertilization and collaboration among these communities.
Perhaps no arcade game is so nostalgically remembered, yet so critically bemoaned, as Dragon's Lair. A bit of a technological neanderthal, the game implemented a unique combination of videogame components and home video replay, garnering great popular media and user attention in a moment of contracted economic returns and popularity for the videogame arcade business. But subsequently, writers and critics have cast the game aside as a cautionary tale of bad game design. In Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity, MJ Clarke revives Dragon's Lair as a fascinating textual experiment interlaced with powerful industrial strategies, institutional discourse, and textual desires around key notions of interactivity and fantasy. Constructing a multifaceted historical study of the game that considers its design, its makers, its recording medium, and its in-game imagery, Clarke suggests that the more appropriate metaphor for Dragon's Lair is not that of a neanderthal, but a socio-technical network, infusing and advancing debates about the production and consumption of new screen technologies. Far from being the gaming failure posited by evolutionary-minded lay critics, Clarke argues, Dragon's Lair offers a fascinating provisional solution to still-unsettled questions about screen media.
In the age of digital media, superheroes are no longer confined to comic books and graphic novels. Their stories are now featured in films, video games, digital comics, television programs, and more. In a single year alone, films featuring Batman, Spider-Man, and the Avengers have appeared on the big screen. Popular media no longer exists in isolation, but converges into complex multidimensional entities. As a result, traditional ideas about the relationship between varying media have come under striking revision. Although this convergence is apparent in many genres, perhaps nowhere is it more persistent, more creative, or more varied than in the superhero genre. Superhero Synergies: Comic Book Characters Go Digital explores this developing relationship between superheroes and various forms of media, examining how the superhero genre, which was once limited primarily to a single medium, has been developed into so many more. Essays in this volume engage with several of the most iconic heroes including Batman, Hulk, and Iron Man through a variety of academic disciplines such as industry studies, gender studies, and aesthetic analysis to develop an expansive view of the genre s potency. The contributors to this volume engage cinema, comics, video games, and even live stage shows to instill readers with new ways of looking at, thinking about, and experiencing some of contemporary media s most popular texts. This unique approach to the examination of digital media and superhero studies provides new and valuable readings of well-known texts and practices. Intended for both academics and fans of the superhero genre, this anthology introduces the innovative and growing synergy between traditional comic books and digital media."
The Game Design Deep Dive series examines specific game systems or mechanics over the course of the history of the industry. This book examines the history of jumping - one of the oldest mechanics in the industry - and how it has evolved and changed over the years. The author looks at the transition from 2D to 3D and multiple elements that make jumping more complicated than it looks from a design perspective. Key Selling Points: The first in a series of books that focus entirely on a singular game design system or mechanic, in this case: jumping. A perfect read for anyone interested in understanding game design, or just curious from a historical standpoint. A must read for anyone interested in building their own platformer or just interested in the history of the game industry's most famous game mechanic. This book is a perfect companion for someone building their first game or as part of a game design classroom. Includes real game examples to highlight the discussed topics and mechanics. Joshua Bycer is a Game Design Critic with more than seven years of experience critically analyzing game design and the industry itself. In that time, through Game-Wisdom, he has interviewed hundreds of game developers and members of the industry about what it means to design video games. He also strives to raise awareness about the importance of studying game design by giving lectures and presentations; his first book was titled 20 Essential Games to Study.
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.
The true murderer has been revealed, and the Investigation Team must return to the Midnight Channel to finally bring the case to an end. Based the Persona 4 video game!
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
Do you have creative ideas that you wish you could transform into code? Do you want to boost your problem solving and logic skills? Do you want to enhance your career by adopting an algorithmic mindset? In our increasingly digital world, coding is an essential skill. Communicating an algorithm to a machine to perform a set of tasks is vital. Beginner's Guide to Code Algorithms: Experiments to Enhance Productivity and Solve Problems written by Deepankar Maitra teaches you how to think like a programmer. The author unravels the secret behind writing code - building a good algorithm. Algorithmic thinking leads to asking the right question and enables a shift from issue resolution to value creation. Having this mindset will make you more marketable to employers. This book takes you on a problem-solving journey to expand your mind and increase your willingness to experiment with code. You will: Learn the art of building an algorithm through hands-on exercises Understand how to develop code for inspiring productivity concepts Build a mentality of developing algorithms to solve problems Develop, test, review, and improve code through guided experimentation This book is designed to develop a culture of logical thinking through intellectual stimulation. It will benefit students and teachers of programming, business professionals, as well as experienced users of Microsoft Excel who wish to become proficient with macros.
Gain an in-depth overview of reinforcement learning for autonomous agents in game development with Unity. This book starts with an introduction to state-based reinforcement learning algorithms involving Markov models, Bellman equations, and writing custom C# code with the aim of contrasting value and policy-based functions in reinforcement learning. Then, you will move on to path finding and navigation meshes in Unity, setting up the ML Agents Toolkit (including how to install and set up ML agents from the GitHub repository), and installing fundamental machine learning libraries and frameworks (such as Tensorflow). You will learn about: deep learning and work through an introduction to Tensorflow for writing neural networks (including perceptron, convolution, and LSTM networks), Q learning with Unity ML agents, and porting trained neural network models in Unity through the Python-C# API. You will also explore the OpenAI Gym Environment used throughout the book. Deep Reinforcement Learning in Unity provides a walk-through of the core fundamentals of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, especially variants of the value estimation, advantage, and policy gradient algorithms (including the differences between on and off policy algorithms in reinforcement learning). These core algorithms include actor critic, proximal policy, and deep deterministic policy gradients and its variants. And you will be able to write custom neural networks using the Tensorflow and Keras frameworks. Deep learning in games makes the agents learn how they can perform better and collect their rewards in adverse environments without user interference. The book provides a thorough overview of integrating ML Agents with Unity for deep reinforcement learning. What You Will Learn Understand how deep reinforcement learning works in games Grasp the fundamentals of deep reinforcement learning Integrate these fundamentals with the Unity ML Toolkit SDK Gain insights into practical neural networks for training Agent Brain in the context of Unity ML Agents Create different models and perform hyper-parameter tuning Understand the Brain-Academy architecture in Unity ML Agents Understand the Python-C# API interface during real-time training of neural networks Grasp the fundamentals of generic neural networks and their variants using Tensorflow Create simulations and visualize agents playing games in Unity Who This Book Is For Readers with preliminary programming and game development experience in Unity, and those with experience in Python and a general idea of machine learning
Games Girls Play examines the role that video games play in girls' lives, including how games structure girls' leisure time, how playing video games constitutes different performances of femininity, and what influences girls to play or not play video games. Through interviews, focus groups, and qualitative content analyses, this book analyzes girls' involvement with video games. It also examines different contexts in which discourses of girls and video games occur, including girl-oriented video games, activist efforts to change the video game industry, and informal education programs that teach girls video game design.
Featuring interviews with the creators of 35 popular video games-including John Madden Football, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, WCW/nWo Revenge, and RBI Baseball-this book gives a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of some of the most influential and iconic (and sometimes forgotten) sports video games of all time. Recounting endless hours of painstaking development, the challenges of working with mega-publishers and the uncertainties of public reception, the interviewees reveal the creative processes that produced some of gaming's classic titles.
Video games are a complex, compelling medium in which established art forms intersect with technology to create an interactive text. Visual arts, architectural design, music, narrative and rules of play all find a place within, and are constrained by, computer systems whose purpose is to create an immersive player experience. In the relatively short life of video game studies, many authors have approached the question of how games function, some focusing on technical aspects of game design, others on rules of play. Taking a holistic view, this study explores how ludology, narratology, visual rhetoric, musical theory and player psychology work (or don't work) together to create a cohesive experience and to provide a unified framework for understanding video games. |
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