John P. Doran - Game Development Patterns and Best Practices: Better games, less hassle

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: April 2017

Production reference: 1180417

ISBN 978-1-78712-783-8

www.packtpub.com

John P. Doran is a technical game designer who has been creating games for over 10 years. He has worked on an assortment of games in teams consisting of just himself to over 70 people in student, mod, and professional projects in different roles, from game designer to lead UI programmer. He previously worked at LucasArts on Star Wars: 1313 as a game designer. He later graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA, with a Bachelor of Science in game design.

John is currently a part of DigiPen's research and development branch in Singapore in addition to DigiPen Game Studios. He is also the lead instructor of the DigiPen-Ubisoft Campus Game Programming Program, instructing graduate-level students in an intensive, advanced-level game programming curriculum. In addition to that, he also tutors and assists students in various subjects and gives lectures on C#, C++, Unreal, Unity, game design, and more.

He is the author of Unreal Engine Game Development Cookbook, Building an FPS Game in Unity, Unity Game Development Blueprints, Getting Started with UDK, UDK Game Development, and Mastering UDK Game Development, and he co-wrote UDK iOS Game Development Beginner's Guide, all available from Packt. More information about him can be found at johnpdoran.com.

Matt Casanova has been programming indie games in C++, as well as mobile games and applications in Java and Objective C, for over ten years. For the last seven years he has assumed the role of technical director for his students. He specializes in 2D game engines and tools.

Matt was an instructor for two years at Digipen Institute of Technology's Singapore campus, where he taught The Advanced Certification in 2D Game Development. This was a six month graduate-level course that specialized in creating 2D game engines. He then spent five years teaching undergraduate courses such as C++, data structures, and game engine architecture for Digipens degree in Real Time Interactive Simulation in South Korea. He has helped dozens of student teams make successful game projects and avoid the pitfalls of bad code. He currently works as lead mobile developer at a software company in Las Vegas.

Francesco Sapio obtained his Computer Science and Control Engineering degree from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, a couple of semesters in advance, scoring summa cum laude. He is currently studying a Master of Science in Engineering in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the same university.

He is a Unity3D and Unreal expert, a skilled game designer, and an experienced user of the major graphics programs. He developed Game@School (Sapienza University of Rome), an educational game for high school students to learn the concepts of physics, and Sticker Book (series) (Dataware Games), a cross-platform series of games for kids. In addition, he worked as consultant for the (successfully funded by Kickstarter) game Prosperity Italy 1434 (Entertainment Game Apps, Inc), and for the open online collaborative ideation system titled Innovoice (Sapienza University of Rome). Moreover, he has been involved in different research projects such as Belief-Driven-Pathfinding (Sapienza University of Rome), a new technique of pathfinding in videogames that was presented as a paper at the DiGRA-FDG Conference 2016; and perfekt.ID (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), which included developing a recommendation system for games.

He is an active writer on the topic of game development. Recently, he authored the book Getting Started with Unity 5.x 2D Game Development (Packt Publishing), which takes your hand and guide you through the amazing journey of game development; the successful Unity UI Cookbook (Packt Publishing), which has been translated into other languages, and which teaches readers how to develop exciting and practical user interfaces for games within Unity; and a short e-guide What do you need to know about Unity (Packt Publishing). In addition, he co-authored the book Unity 5.x 2D Game Development Blueprints (Packt Publishing). Furthermore, he has also been a reviewer for the following books: Game Physics Cookbook (Packt Publishing), Mastering Unity 5.x (Packt Publishing), Unity 5.x by Example (Packt Publishing), and Unity Game Development Scripting (Packt Publishing).

Francesco is also a musician and a composer, especially of soundtracks for short films and video games. For several years, he worked as an actor and dancer, where he was a guest of honor at the Brancaccio theater in Rome. In addition, he is a very active person, having volunteered as a children's entertainer at the Associazione Culturale Torraccia in Rome.