Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development

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

Table of Contents

Part I Game Design and Paper Prototyping
Chapter 1 Thinking Like a Designer
Chapter 2 Game Analysis Frameworks
Chapter 3 The Layered Tetrad
Chapter 4 The Inscribed Layer
Chapter 5 The Dynamic Layer
Chapter 6 The Cultural Layer
Chapter 7 Acting Like a Designer
Chapter 8 Design Goals
Chapter 9 Paper Prototyping
Chapter 10 Game Testing
Chapter 11 Math and Game Balance
Chapter 12 Puzzle Design
Chapter 13 Guiding the Player
Chapter 14 The Digital Game Industry

Part II Digital Prototyping
Chapter 15 Thinking in Digital Systems
Chapter 16 Introducing Our Development Environment: Unity
Chapter 17 Introducing Our Language: C#
Chapter 18 Hello World: Your First Program
Chapter 19 Variables and Components
Chapter 20 Boolean Operations and Conditionals
Chapter 21 Loops
Chapter 22 Lists and Arrays
Chapter 23 Functions and Parameters
Chapter 24 Debugging
Chapter 25 Classes
Chapter 26 Object-Oriented Thinking
Chapter 27 The Agile Mentality

Part III Game Prototype Examples and Tutorials
Chapter 28 Prototype 1: Apple Picker
Chapter 29 Prototype 2: Mission Demolition
Chapter 30 Prototype 3: Space SHMUP
Chapter 31 Prototype 4: Prospector Solitaire
Chapter 32 Prototype 5: Bartok
Chapter 33 Prototype 6: Word Game
Chapter 34 Prototype 7: QuickSnap
Chapter 35 Prototype 8: Omega Mage

Part IV Appendices
Appendix A Standard Project Setup Procedure
Appendix B Useful Concepts Reference
Appendix C Online References