Learn Game Design, Prototyping, and Programming with Today’s Leading Tools: Unity™ and C#
Award-winning game designer and professor Jeremy Gibson has spent the last decade teaching game design and working as an independent game developer. Over the years, his most successful students have always been those who effectively combined game design theory, concrete rapid-prototyping practices, and programming skills.
Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development is the first time that all three of these disciplines have been brought together into a single book. It is a distillation of everything that Gibson has learned teaching hundreds of game designers and developers in his years at the #1 university games program in North America. It fully integrates the disciplines of game design and computer programming and helps you master the crucial practice of iterative prototyping using Unity. As the top game engine for cross-platform game development, Unity allows you to write a game once and deliver it to everything from Windows, OS X, and Linux applications to webpages and all of the most popular mobile platforms.
If you want to develop games, you need strong experience with modern best practices and professional tools. There’s no substitute. There’s no shortcut. But you can get what you need in this book.
COVERAGE INCLUDES
- In-depth tutorials for eight different game prototypes
- Developing new game design concepts
- Moving quickly from design concepts to working digital prototypes
- Improving your designs through rapid iteration
- Playtesting your games and interpreting the feedback that you receive
- Tuning games to get the right “game balance” and “game feel”
- Developing with Unity, today’s best engine for independent game development
- Learning C# the right way
- Using Agile and Scrum to efficiently organize your game design and development process
- Debugging your game code
- Getting into the highly competitive, fast-changing game industry
Praise for
Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development
“Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development combines a solid grounding in evolving game design theory with a wealth of detailed examples of prototypes for digital games. Together these provide an excellent introduction to game design and development that culminates in making working games with Unity. This book will be useful for both introductory courses and as a reference for expert designers. I will be using this book in my game design classes, and it will be among those few to which I often refer.”
–Michael Sellers
Professor of Practice in Game Design, Indiana University, former Creative Director at Rumble Entertainment, and General Manager at Kabam
“Prototyping and play-testing are often the most misunderstood and/or underutilized steps in the game design and development process. Iterative cycles of testing and refining are key to the early stages of making a good game. Novices will often believe that they need to know everything about a language or build every asset of the game before they can really get started. Gibson’s new book prepares readers to go ahead and dive in to the actual design and prototyping process right away; providing the basics of process and technology with excellent “starter kits” for different types of games to jumpstart their entry into the practice.”
–Stephen Jacobs
Associate Director, RIT Center for Media, Art, Games, Interaction, and Creativity (MAGIC) and Professor, School of Interactive Games and Media
“Jeremy Gibson’s Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development deftly combines the necessary philosophical and practical concepts for anyone looking to become a Game Designer. This book will take you on a journey from high-level design theories, through game development concepts and programming foundations in order to make your own playable video games. Jeremy uses his years of experience as a professor to teach the reader how to think with vital game design mindsets so that you can create a game with all the right tools at hand. A must-read for someone who wants to dive right into making their first game and a great refresher for industry veterans.”
–Michelle Pun
Senior Game Designer, Zynga
