Game Design Essentials - Softcover

Mitchell, Briar Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1118159276 ISBN 13: 9781118159279

Publisher: Sybex, 2012

Synopsis

An easy-to-follow primer on the fundamentals of digital game design

The quickly evolving mobile market is spurring digital game creation into the stratosphere, with revenue from games exceeding that of the film industry. With this guide to the basics, you'll get in on the game of digital game design while you learn the skills required for storyboarding, character creation, environment creation, level design, programming, and testing.

• Teaches basic skill sets in the context of current systems, genres, and game-play styles
• Demonstrates how to design for different sectors within gaming including console, PC, handheld, and mobile
• Explores low-poly modeling for game play
• Addresses character and prop animation, lighting and rendering, and environment design
• Discusses the path from concept to product, including pre- and post-production
• Includes real-world scenarios and interviews with key studio and industry professionals

With Game Design Essentials, you'll benefit from a general-but-thorough overview of the core art and technology fundamentals of digital game design for the 21st century.

About this title

About the Author

Briar Lee Mitchell is a partner in the gaming company Star Mountain Studios, as well as a creator of the successful adventure game Apparitions, made with SyFy's ghost hunters, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson. She was previously a lead artist at Universal Studios Games Division, overseeing the art for K-6 edutainment computer games. Her career began in the 1980s with Lucasfilm and the Smithsonian on their first interactive laserdisc, The Life and Times of Albert Einstein. Mitchell has a master's degree in medical and biological illustration from the University of California, San Francisco, and she has worked for Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Yale medical institutions producing medical/forensic illustrations and animations. She has also taught courses in visual effects, animation, and game art design at the college level.

From the Back Cover

Learn Game Design Quickly and Easily

This full-color guide gives newcomers a solid foundation in the fundamentals of digital game design. From key design concepts to setting up gameplay navigation to understanding production pipelines, this is the perfect primer, with coverage that includes designing for consoles, PCs, TVs, smartphones, and tablets. If you're an aspiring game artist, here's your chance to learn the art, the technology, and the techniques you need to succeed in this exciting field.

Learn these game design essentials—and more:

• Game types, from action to educational to role-playing

• Core components—story, characters, props, animation

• How the playback system affects the visual design

• Animation, texture, lighting, sound, and 3D modeling

• The game design production pipeline, start to finish

• Modes, menus, adjusting gameplay, and other navigation basics

• Building levels, interfaces, and a Game Design Document (GDD)

• Life in the studio—interviews with industry pros

Learn about the art of creating game backgrounds to convey grandeur or complexity

Good audio and sound effects are an integral part of game creation

This striking Essentials book features:

• Chapter-opening learning objectives

• Step-by-step tutorials

• Four-color screenshots and illustrations

• Essentials and Beyond—summaries and additional suggested exercises

• Downloadable support files

Edition details

• Publisher: Sybex
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1118159276
• ISBN 13: 9781118159279
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320