Ray Barrera - Unity 2017 Game AI Programming, Third Edition

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First published: July 2013
Second edition: September 2015
Third edition: January 2018

Production reference: 1090118

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Ray Barrera is a software engineer, who has spent the better part of the decade working on various serious, entertainment and educational projects in Unity. He has spoken at college campuses, and presented a talk at Unite 2017 in Austin, on app development in Unity. He is currently working in education tech as director of mobile engineering at a well-known education company. Free time outside of work is spent on a number of hobbies, including hiking, music, and cooking (primarily Mexican food).

Aung Sithu Kyaw is passionate about graphics programming, creating video games, writing, and sharing knowledge with others. He holds an MSc in digital media technology from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Lastly, he worked as a research associate, which involved implementing a sensor-based real-time movie system using Unreal Development Kit. In 2011, he founded a tech start-up focusing on interactive media productions and backend server-side technologies.

Thet Naing Swe has been working in the software and game industry for more than 10 years and has a passion for creating all types of games including serious, casual, casino and AAA games.

He received the 1st class Honor Degree in Computer Games Development from University of Central Lancashire, UK in 2008 and started working as a game programmer at CodeMonkey studio for a year before joining NTU Singapore as a graphic programmer using UDK. He founded JoyDash Pte Ltd Singapore in 2014 where it produces casino, casual and multiplayer mobile games mainly for Myanmar market.

Davide Aversa completed his Master in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and Ph.D. in Computer Science at La Sapienza University of Rome where he has been involved in research applied to pathfinding and decision making for digital games characters, and computational creativity.

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Welcome to the wonderful world of AI in games, or, more specifically, AI in Unity. This book focuses on the Unity implementations of AI-related features and also delves into the basic concepts behind those features. It even provides ground-up examples of some of them. Along the way, this book provides example projects and sample code for the reader to follow, play with, and, hopefully, build upon in their own projects.

While the reader is not expected to be an advanced programmer, this book does assume some base-level knowledge of C# and scripting in Unity. That said, the sample code provided is well commented and explained throughout the book in a very detailed way, in order to describe the reason behind each decision and every line of code. Familiarity with some of the algorithms provided is certainly helpful, but by no means required. This book will explain the theory and origin of the concepts and then delve into implementations that highlight the core functionality we're looking for. Extraneous code is kept to a minimum to allow the reader to truly focus on the book's main objectivelearning AI game programming in Unity.