What lies beyond the veil of death? Journey past this mortal coil and discover the secrets of the Shadowlands. Study the practices around death and dying on Azeroth, then follow a Broker through the groves of Ardenweald, over the gleaming towers of Bastion, and into the depths of the Maw for a detailed voyage unlike any other. Featuring gorgeous artwork never before glimpsed by mortal eyes, a stunning fold-out map, and secrets straight from the game team, Grimoire of the Shadowlands and Beyond is made to be treasured for eternity. In his authorial debut, Blizzard Entertainment historian Sean Copeland teams up with World of Warcraft's Lead Narrative Designer, Steve Danuser, to open the vaults of hidden knowledge for all curious souls.

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.

Looking to become more efficient using Unity? How to Cheat in Unity 5 takes a no-nonsense approach to help you achieve fast and effective results with Unity 5. Geared towards the intermediate user, HTC in Unity 5 provides content beyond what an introductory book offers, and allows you to work more quickly and powerfully in Unity. Packed full with easy-to-follow methods to get the most from Unity, this book explores time-saving features for interface customization and scene management, along with productivity-enhancing ways to work with rendering and optimization. In addition, this book features a companion website at www.alanthorn.net, where you can download the book's companion files and also watch bonus tutorial video content. Learn bite-sized tips and tricks for effective Unity workflows Become a more powerful Unity user through interface customization Enhance your productivity with rendering tricks, better scene organization and more Better understand Unity asset and import workflows Learn techniques to save you time and money during development

In both video games and animated films, worlds are constructed through a combination of animation, which defines what players see on the screen, and music and sound, which provide essential cues to action, emotion, and narrative. This book offers a rich exploration of the intersections between animation, video games, and music and sound, bringing together a range of multidisciplinary lenses. In fourteen chapters, the contributors consider similarities and differences in how music and sound structure video games and animation, as well as the animation within video games, and explore core topics of nostalgia, adaptation, gender and sexuality. Offering fresh insights into the aesthetic interplay of animation, video games, and sound, this volume provides a gateway into new areas of study that will be of interest to scholars and students across musicology, animation studies, game studies, and media studies more broadly.

A laugh-out-loud 'best of' selection of TommyInnit's most weird and wonderful quotes - plus much more - carefully selected to BLOW YOUR MIND by him and best friend Wilbur Soot. 'Nah, I think I'd be a pretty bad shark' 'What if God was just legs?' 'We're really just chilling, fellas' Born sometime in the early 2000s, TommyInnit's first job was a YouTuber. No, really, we're not joking, the very first job he had was a YouTuber. For the last three years, he's been mouthing off on the internet to anyone who will listen. So far, that's over 40 million followers. Will there ever be an end to TommyInnit's rampant flurry of success? Probably. And Wilbur Soot has been right by his side. Wilbur first started his career as a young man staring at the wall until he also became a YouTuber. He also discovered a little activity some may call 'singing'. In The Quote Book, TommyInnit covers a wealth of topics from cars-that-grow-teeth to slime people, and from things that be crazy to octopi. Curated and edited by Wilbur Soot, TommyInnit is about to change your life one word at a time. Unless, dear reader, you read two words at a time, like he does. Featuring: A day in the life Inside TommyInnit's brain What TommyInnit would do if he was God Life advice from Wilbur Love poetry and history lessons, TommyInnit style Wilbur's attempts to reason with TommyInnit

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.

a balanced blend of theoretical and practical information that enables readers to develop 3D worlds quickly and efficiently.

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

The Year of the Raven reaches new heights on dark wings! With a few years under its collective belt, the Hearthstone team needed to find an edge: sharper and more striking than a corvid's beak. In The Art of Hearthstone, Volume IV: Year of the Raven, the designers, engineers, and artists of the smash-hit digital card game pour their cunning into innovative design changes, remarkable animated art, and all-new transmedia content. From the haunted lands of Gilneas in The Witchwood soaring to the laboratories of Outland in The Boomsday Project and touching down to the lively arena of Rastakhan's Rumble, the Year of the Raven has something unique for everyone. Fly alongside the Hearthstone team's creative genius (or madness?) to learn how it was done!

Bungie presents the Destiny Grimoire Anthology, a must-have collectible lore compendium designed and assembled for Destiny's devoted and enlightened scholars and lore lovers, as well as fans of fantasy and science fiction storytelling. Until now, the myths, mysteries, and machinations of the Destiny universe were found hidden throughout the worlds - enticing threads that hinted at a greater tapestry. The Destiny Grimoire Anthology weaves tales from multiple sources together for the first time, casting new light on Destiny's most legendary heroes, infamous villains, and their greatest moments of triumph and tragedy. Each unique volume intends to illuminate a facet of the world, and the complete anthology will confirm and challenge players' thoughts and assumptions on what it means to be a Guardian, offering new and differing perspectives on the cosmic war that rages between the Traveler and its ancient enemies.

3D rotation analysis is widely encountered in everyday problems thanks to the development of computers. Sensing 3D using cameras and sensors, analyzing and modeling 3D for computer vision and computer graphics, and controlling and simulating robot motion all require 3D rotation computation. This book focuses on the computational analysis of 3D rotation, rather than classical motion analysis. It regards noise as random variables and models their probability distributions. It also pursues statistically optimal computation for maximizing the expected accuracy, as is typical of nonlinear optimization. All concepts are illustrated using computer vision applications as examples. Mathematically, the set of all 3D rotations forms a group denoted by SO(3). Exploiting this group property, we obtain an optimal solution analytical or numerically, depending on the problem. Our numerical scheme, which we call the "Lie algebra method," is based on the Lie group structure of SO(3). This book also proposes computing projects for readers who want to code the theories presented in this book, describing necessary 3D simulation setting as well as providing real GPS 3D measurement data. To help readers not very familiar with abstract mathematics, a brief overview of quaternion algebra, matrix analysis, Lie groups, and Lie algebras is provided as Appendix at the end of the volume.

This book is an important collection for scholars and students interested in the critical analysis of digital games, and will be of interest across several disciplines including game studies, game design and development, internet studies, visual studies, cultural studies, communication studies, and media studies, as well as disability studies The book explores the opportunities and challenges people with disabilities experience in the context of digital games from the perspective of three related areas: representation, access and inclusion, and community Drawing on key concerns in disability media studies, the book brings together scholars from disability studies and game studies, alongside game developers, educators, and disability rights activists, to reflect upon the increasing visibility of disabled characters in digital games Chapters explore the contemporary gaming environment as it relates to disability on platforms such as Twitch, Minecraft, and Tingyou, while also addressing future possibilities and pitfalls for people with disabilities within gaming given the rise of virtual reality applications, and augmented games such as Pokemon Go The book also asks how game developers can attempt to represent diverse abilities, taking games such as BlindSide and Overwatch as examples

A mysterious group of phantom thieves skulks in the shadows of Tokyo, changing the hearts of corrupt adults. But behind their masks are... normal teenagers and a talking black cat?! PERSONA 5: MEMENTOS MISSION is an all-new mystery featuring the cast of PERSONA 5. IN THIS VOLUME: The attempted poisoning of an influential CEO... Suspicious happenings at a local doctor's clinic... Sketchy job requests at a back-street military shop... High schooler and phantom thieves leader Ren Amamiya tackles these mysterious incidents together with his trustworthy friends and the famous high school detective Goro Akechi!

Analyses a variety of approaches to development and publishing, across a multitude of platforms and genres, to provide a new vision for the next twenty years of game development. Considers technical advances in adjacent markets and how they will impact the games industry over the next twenty years. Includes insightful interviews from leading game and entertainment industry figures.

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.

Not all games are released equal. The barriers of language and culture can leave our world divided, and this includes the video games that we get the chance to play. Matt Barnes, Dazz Brown and Greg Seago-Curl of DidYouKnowGaming? created the YouTube series Region Locked to offer an insight into the weird and wonderful titles that never left their home countries, and now they bring their expertise to you, the gaming reader. Encounter masterpieces you never knew existed from your favourite series and developers, as well as some utterly bizarre creations that seem so outlandish you might wonder how on earth they were released in the first place, from the trippy, meandering dreamscapes of 1998's LSD: Dream Emulator to The Mysterious Murasame Castle, released in 1986 by Nintendo, and the intergalactic adventures of Crime Crackers (1994). The authors explore what it's like to play these games, and investigate the fascinating characters and maverick designers behind them to discover why such remarkable creations never enjoyed international exposure. For the casual gamer, keen developer, intrigued reader and hardcore fan alike, Region Locked is the key to a surreal and adventurous journey through the lost world of video games.

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.

Initially announced as 'Project Dolphin', the GameCube would represent Nintendo's transition to the world of digital media. The GameCube Anthology is a unique and original book celebrating the machine's memory, and was written by the same author who brought you the Nintendo 64 Anthology. The year was 1999. As the new century and millennium dawned, so did a new era of gaming. The graphic quality of console productions was nearing that of the pre-rendered 3D that had astonished us a few years earlier on the PlayStation especially. In the space of a few years, our hopes became reality. Brought to life by the new, so-called '128-bit generation' of consoles. Nintendo would have to play the pioneers if they hoped to compete. Up against their old enemy (Sega), a new and successful console (PlayStation), and the powerful newcomer from the PC industry (Microsoft), the Kyoto-based company geared up for a new console war. From the Cube's origins to the end of its life cycle, the GameCube Anthology covers it all in this new and richly illustrated account. CONTENTS: GameCube History Complete Software Library (647 games) Hardware Collectible Games and Objects Collector's Special (1272 versions of the GameCube releases

"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.

Expert advice from several industrial professionals who have worked for some of the world's biggest tech and interactive companies. Best practices that not only prepare writers on how to apply their craft to new fields, but also prepare them for the common ambiguity they will find in corporate and start-up environments. Breakdown of platforms that shows how tech capabilities can fulfill content expectations and how content can fulfill tech expectations. Basic storytelling mechanics customized to today's popular technologies and traditional gaming platforms.

Combining theory and practice, this updated new edition provides a complete overview of how to create deep and meaningful quests for games. It uses the Unity game engine in conjunction with Fungus and other free plugins to provide an accessible entry into quest design. The book begins with an introduction to the theory and history of quests in games, before covering four theoretical components of quests: their spaces, objects, actors, and challenges. Each chapter also includes a practical section, with accompanying exercises and suggestions for the use of specific technologies for four crucial aspects of quest design: * level design * quest item creation * NPC and dialogue construction * scripting This book will be of great interest to all game designers looking to create new, innovative quests in their games. It will also appeal to new media researchers, as well as humanities scholars in the fields of mythology and depth-psychology that want to bring computer-assisted instruction into their classroom in an innovative way. The companion website includes lecture and workshop slides, and can be accessed at: www.designingquests.com

Fully detailed game projects from scratch. Beginners can do the steps and create games right away. No coding experience is necessary. Numerous examples take a raw beginner towards professional coding proficiency in C# and Unity. Includes a thorough introduction to Unity 2020 All required software is professional quality and completely free to use for any purpose including commercial applications and games.