Game Development with Three.Js

With Three.js you can create sophisticated 3D games that run in the web browser. This book is aimed at both the professional game designer and the enthusiast with a step by step approach including lots of tips and examples.

Overview

• Develop immersive 3D games that anyone can play on the Internet
• Learn Three.js from a gaming perspective, including everything you need to build beautiful and high-performance worlds
• A step-by-step guide filled with game-focused examples and tips

In Detail

The advent of WebGL and its inclusion in many browsers enabled JavaScript programs running in a web browser to access the GPU without a plugin or extension. Three.js is a next generation high-level library that makes it possible to author complex 3D computer animations that display in the browser using nothing more than a simple text editor. The development of these new tools has opened up the world of real-time 3D computer animations to a far broader spectrum of developers.

Starting with how to build 3D games on the web using the Three.js graphics library, you will learn how to build 3D worlds with meshes, lighting, user interaction, physics, and more. Along the way, you'll learn how to build great online games through fun examples. Use this book as a guide to embrace the next generation of game development!

Moving on from the basics, you will learn how to use Three.js to build game worlds using its core components, including renderers, geometries, materials, lighting, cameras, and scenes. Following on from this, you will learn how to work with mouse and keyboard interactions, incorporate game physics, and import custom models and animations. You will also learn how to include effects like particles, sounds, and post-processing. You will start by building a 3D world, and then create a first person shooter game using it. You will then be shown how to imbue this FPS game with a "capture the flag" gameplay objective. With Game Development with Three.js, you will be able to build 3D games on the Web using the Three.js graphics library.

What you will learn from this book

• Set up a Three.js scene representing a game world
• Understand the types of Three.js components, including geometries, materials, lighting, cameras, and renderers
• Interact with your games using the mouse and keyboard
• Structure your worlds with various approaches to physical collision
• Construct complex levels using several different methods
• Extend the Three.js framework with custom game-specific classes
• Gain insight into development processes and important design and performance considerations for web games
• Achieve a basic understanding of multiplayer game networking

Approach

A step-by-step, example-based guide to building immersive 3D games on the Web using the Three.js graphics library.

Who this book is written for

This book is for people interested in programming 3D games for the Web. Readers are expected to have basic knowledge of JavaScript syntax and a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. This book will be useful regardless of prior experience with game programming, whether you intend to build casual side projects or large-scale professional titles.

Isaac Sukin

Isaac has been building games since he was 8 years old, starting on the day he discovered that Nerf Arena Blast came with a copy of Epic Games' Unreal Editor. At 16, Isaac 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 how to code around the same time by developing an open-source Facebook-style statuses system that thousands of websites have adopted. Since then, Isaac 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, Isaac 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 http://www.isaacsukin.com.

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