Sukin - Game Development with Three.js

Isaac Sukin has been building games since he was eight years old, when he discovered that Nerf Arena Blast came with a copy of Epic Games' Unreal Editor. At 16, he became co-leader of the Community Bonus Pack team, an international group of game developers for the Unreal Engine that won 49 awards over the next few years. He started learning to code around the same time by developing an open source Facebook-style statuses system that thousands of websites have adopted. Since then, he has been increasingly drawn to interactive JavaScript on the web. He created an open source 2D game engine in early 2012 and then dove into Three.js.

As of 2013, he is a senior, studying entrepreneurship and information management at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked for Twitter, First Round Capital, and Acquia among others, and was previously a freelance consultant and developer. He is also a founder of Dorm Room Fund, a student-run venture capital fund that invests in student-run startups. You can find him on GitHub and Twitter under the alias IceCreamYou or visit his website at www.isaacsukin.com.

He has previously published short stories and poetry, but this is his first book.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for your love and support in exploring my passions. To Lauren and Sarah, I am so proud to have such amazing little sisters. I love you.

And a shout out to the CBP3 team! Thanks for a lot of fun over the years.

Ian Langworth is the co-founder and CTO of Artillery, which aims to bring console-quality games to the browser using HTML5, WebGL, and other cutting-edge browser technology. Prior to Artillery, he was the first engineering hire at Redbeacon (acquired by The Home Depot in 2012), and before that he was a software engineer at Google. He is the co-author of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook , O'Reilly, 2005.

Wenli Zhang is a graduate student at Digital Art Lab of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She has sufficient experience in web design and programming and shows great interest in it. She's familiar with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Three.js, jQuery, PHP, and so on. She's also interested in graphics rendering and image processing.

She originally learned Three.js for a game to demonstrate web audio during her internship in Intel corp. Owing to her knowledge in the field of computer graphics and previous experience with OpenGL, she learned Three.js quickly and developed a 3D Arcalands game within a week. After that, she used Three.js for several applications and found it efficient and easy to use.

She has also developed a jQuery plugin named jWebAudio (http://01org.github.io/jWebAudio/), which is a web audio library designed for games.

Her personal site is http://ovilia.github.com.

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Preface

Three.js is an easy-to-learn 3D graphics library for the web. This book explains the Three.js API and how to use it to build immersive online games. By the time you finish this book, you'll be able to reach millions of gamers through their web browsers, and you'll build exciting projects such as a first-person shooter along the way.

I've been building games for more than a decade. When I discovered Three.js, the first project I built was very similar to the first-person shooter game you'll build in , Exploring and Interacting . I was hooked by how quickly I could create fun games with no prior exposure to the library.

In Game Development with Three.js , I've tried to stay true to that exploratory spirit. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

What this book covers

, Hello, Three.js , describes what Three.js is and what it does, how to start writing code with it, and a basic scene.

, Building a World , explains the components of a Three.js scene including renderers, geometries, materials, and lighting for building a procedurally generated city.

, Exploring and Interacting , explains mouse and keyboard interaction, basic physics, and creating a first-person shooter game.

, Adding Detail , explains particle systems, sound, graphic effects, and managing external assets such as 3D models in addition to building a capture-the-flag game.