Game Development Tool Essentials

Game Development Tool Essentials provides must-have tips and tricks from industry professionals for strengthening and streamlining your game tools pipeline. Everyone knows the game tools pipeline is important, but in the current environment of shrinking budgets and increased time pressure, developers often have to settle for inefficient, ad hoc, messy pipelines.

This unique book will break you out of that cycle. The practical, expert insights contained within will enable you to work faster and more efficiently, so you can spend more time making cool things. Game Development Tool Essentials pools the knowledge and experience of working developers over four critical aspects of the game tools pipeline: asset and data management, geometry and models, Web tools, and programming. Within those sections, you will learn cutting-edge techniques on essential subjects such as COLLADA rendering, exporting and workflow; asset management and compiler architecture; and moving tools to the cloud. If you’re a game developer, you need Game Development Tool Essentials.

• Covers readily available tools and tools developers can build themselves.
• Presents 96 code samples, 81 illustrations, and end-of-chapter references.
• Special chapter on moving tools to the cloud.

What you’ll learn

• Set up and code a plug-in-based asset compiler that can help convert a variety of asset types.
• Create a complex polygon pattern (Voronoi diagram) using MAXScript.
• Learn how to use the Khronos COLLADA CTS to build a rock solid 3D content pipeline.
• Discover powerful tricks for using OS X Scene Kit to render COLLADA assets.
• Build full-featured online game development tools easily with Django.
• Move companion tools out of the game engine and into Web applications.

Who this book is for

Game Development Tool Essentials is for working and prospective game developers. It will help software engineers, systems programmers, graphics architects, technical artists, 3D artists, software architects, and 3D modelers involved with the game development pipeline.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Asset and Data Management
Chapter 1. Plug-in based Asset Compiler Architecture
Chapter 2. Asset Data Management

Part 2: Geometry and Models
Chapter 3. 3D Format Conversion
Chapter 4. Building Procedural Geometry Using MAXScript
Chapter 5. A Uniform Geometry Workflow for Animated Feature Films
Chapter 6. Rock-solid Content Pipeline with the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite
Chapter 7. Rendering COLLADA Assets on Mac OS X with Scene Kit
Chapter 8. COLLADA Exporter for Unity Developers in the Unity Asset Store

Part 3: Web Tools
Chapter 9. Utilizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to Create Rich Debugging Information
Chapter 10. Moving Tools to the Cloud: Control, Configure, and Monitor your Game with WebSocket

Part 4: Programming
Chapter 11. Decoupling Game Tool GUIs from Core Editing Operations
Chapter 12. Building a Game Prototyping Tool for Android Mobile Devices
Chapter 13. Engineering Domain-specific Languages for Games