Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development

Book excerpt: 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.