The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners - Softcover

Jacob Habgood; Mark Overmars

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590596153 ISBN 13: 9781590596159

Publisher: Apress, 2006

Synopsis

NOTE: If the book has a mention of a CD,please look for its contents in extras.springer.com . The link is included in the copyright page of the book.

The Game Makers Apprentice shows you how to create nine exciting games using the wildly popular Game Maker game creation tool. This book covers a range of genres, including action, adventure, and puzzle games complete with professional quality sound effects and visuals. It discusses game design theory and features practical examples of how this can be applied to developing games that are more fun to play.

Game Maker allows games to be created using a simple drag-and-drop interface, so you don’t need to have any prior coding experience. It includes an optional programming language for adding advanced features to your games, when you feel ready to do so. You can obtain more information by visiting book.gamemaker.nl.

The authors include the creator of the Game Maker tool and a former professional game programmer, so you’ll glean understanding from their expertise. The book also includes supplementary materials (on Apress.com) containing Game Maker software and all of the game projects that are created in the book—plus a host of professional-quality graphics and sound effects that you can use in your own games.

About this title

About the Author:

Jacob's career in the games industry spans fourteen years, but he has been programming games as an amateur and professional now for a quarter of a century. During this time he has worked on over a dozen published games for all the major console platforms, including as the lead programmer of the cult British game, Hogs of War. He has programmed, designed and project-managed titles for publishers like Gremlin, Infogrames, Atari, Disney and Konami and he truly knows the meaning of the word "crunch".
Somehow he also found time to study a Ph.D. in the psychology of learning and has a passion for most things that connect video games and learning (including a whole lot of research involving zombies: zombiedivision.co.uk). This passion also extends to teaching game development, which he practices in his position as Senior Lecturer in Game Development at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK.

Review:

From the reviews:

"The desire to create computer games attracts many young people to computing. This book meets the needs of this group of readers and students very well. It is also a fine introduction to the making of computer games for the experienced software developer who always wondered how games were made. ... There are excellent software development lessons that can be learned using this book ... . the book provides a superb introduction to programming as well as to game construction." (Anthony J. Duben, ACM Computing Reviews, Vol. 49 (5), May, 2008)

About this edition

• Publisher: Apress
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1590596153
• ISBN 13: 9781590596159
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336