Dr. Claudio Scolastici - Mobile Game Design Essentials

Diane Harding has been a software developer for over 35 years, and has extensive expertise in the design and development of large-scale software packages that integrate data from a wide variety of sources, for interactive screen editing and display, as well as database archival. She has developed web-based applications with access via web browser (portal) or graphical user interface, and has been a fluent programmer in Fortran, C, C++, SQL, Perl, XML, Java, and JSP. Her background also includes extensive technical and numerical analysis experience in Ocean Sciences including side-scan sonar, bathymetry, and multi-static acoustics. She was born and raised in Hawaii and went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received a degree in Applied Mathematics. She currently resides in Kailua, Hawaii.

Over her career, Diane Harding has been a senior software engineer for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge Massachusetts, for the University of Hawaii Institute of Geophysics, Honolulu, for Fugro Seafloor Surveys, Inc. based in Seattle, Washington, and for Applied Marine Solutions, a DOD contractor based in Hawaii.

Diane Harding has co-authored and contributed to articles and abstracts published in EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union and other journals, as well as worked as a technical editor and a contributor on numerous work-related proposals submitted to various government funding agencies. She has also generated user and technical manuals for the software packages developed, for distribution to the end users and installation of the applications.

Kahl Sada fell in love with video games thanks to Alley Cat, but only with Metal Gear Solid did he realize that being a game designer was his lifetime dream. He started creating games with RPG Maker then moved to Unity 3D to create more interesting and deep gameplay. Specializing in Guerrilla Prototyping and in Gameplay Balancing, he is now a full-time employee of Lunar Walkers LTD.

Mehul Shukla is one of the PlayStation Mobile specialists in the SCEE R&D Developer Services Team. The Developer Services Team provides front-line engineering support for all game developers, large or small, on all PlayStation platforms. He provides technical support and performance advice to developers all over the globe on the PSM community forums on a daily basis.

He has also given technical talks about PlayStation Mobile development at a number of games industry conferences and academic events.

Mehul joined SCEE R&D right after his University education. He has a Master's degree in Games Programming and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Systems Engineering.

He has also worked as a technical reviewer for P layStationMobile Development Cookbook , Packt Publishing .

I would like to thank the authors, David Nolte and Claudio Scolastici, for the hard work they have put in and for sharing their invaluable experience of the games industry. There is a lot I have learned during the reviewing of this book and I hope others too can benefit from it. I wish the authors all the best for the future.

Francis Styck has been developing games since his college days at UNLV, while pursuing an Engineering degree in the 1980s, when games were written in Assembly language on the Atari 800 and Commodore 64. He continued with his education at UNLV and graduated with an MBA in 2001. Today, he is still writing games but now uses the power of C++, Marmalade, and Cocos2d-x to support many platforms and devices. You can stay in touch with Francis using LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/styck.

Sergio Viudes Carbonell is a 31-year-old software developer from Elche, Spain. He works developing apps and video games for the Web and Android.

He has played video games since his childhood. He started playing with his brother's Spectrum when he was just 5 years old. When he bought his first PC (well, his parents did), he was 14 years old, and started learning computer programming, computer drawing, and music composition (using the famous Fast Tracker 2). When he finished high school, he studied Computer Science at the University of Alicante.