Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development

Learn All the Design & Development Skills You Need to Make Great Games with Unity, the World's Most Popular Professional Game Engine

If you want to design and develop games, there is no substitute for strong, hands-on experience with modern techniques and tools. That is exactly what this book provides. Leading instructor and indie game developer Jeremy Gibson Bond covers all three disciplines that you need to succeed: game design theory, rapid iterative prototyping, and practical programming.

Building on two previous best-sellers, this Third Edition contains hundreds of improvements across more than 400 new pages, all designed to make it even easier to understand and more useful in modern game development.

The five game tutorials have been thoroughly revised and expanded to cover even more best practices for prototyping and development, and all examples now use Unity 2020.3 LTS (Long Term Support), a stable and feature-rich standard for years to come. The new content includes greatly enhanced tutorials, a chapter on Unity’s high-performance Data-Oriented Tech Stack (DOTS), new Coding Challenges to help you transition to making your own games from scratch, and tips on next steps after you have finished the book. The revamped website includes playable versions of all example games, plus an exciting new tool that provides immediate feedback on potential errors in your own code.

Part I: Game Design and Paper Prototyping

• Use the Layered Tetrad to understand and design powerful interactive experiences.
• Explore the core game design practices of paper prototyping, testing, and iteration.
• Learn effective strategies for staying on track and on schedule.
• Get tips for finding a rewarding job in today’s industry.

Part II: Programming C# in Unity

• Learn C# from the basics through class inheritance, object-oriented programming, and data-oriented design.

Part III: Game Prototype Tutorials

• Implement games across five genres: arcade, casual physics, space shooter, solitaire card game, and top-down adventure game. Each game is designed to be easily extensible into your own projects.Take three games from prototype to “first playable” through new extended tutorial chapters that refi ne the games further than in previous editions of the book.

NEW! Part IV: Next Steps

• Tackle the new, growing library of Coding Challenges, a proven method for transitioning from tutorials to creating your own projects from scratch.Get ideas and resources for new projects to tackle on your own.

Jeremy Gibson Bond is a Professor of Practice teaching game design and development at Michigan State University, which in 2022 was ranked the #1 public university for undergraduate game development by Princeton Review three of the last four years. Since 2013, he has served the IndieCade independent game festival and conference as the Chair of Education and Advancement, where he co-chairs the IndieXchange summit each year and has also chaired the GameU summit. In 2013, Jeremy founded the company ExNinja Interactive, through which he develops his independent game projects. Jeremy has spoken several times at the Game Developers Conference. He also created the official Unity Certified Programmer Exam Review specialization on Coursera, which thousands of developers (including several Unity employees) used to prepare for the UCP exam from 2018-2022.

Prior to joining the Games faculty at Michigan State, Jeremy taught for three years as a lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor where he taught game design and software development. From 2009-2013, Jeremy was an assistant professor teaching game design for the Games and Interactive Media Division of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, which was named the #1 game design school in North America throughout his tenure there.

Jeremy earned a Master of Entertainment Technology degree from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center in 2007 and a Bachelor of Science degree in Radio, Television, and Film from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999. Jeremy has worked as a programmer and prototyper for companies such as Human Code and frog design; has taught classes for Great Northern Way Campus (in Vancouver, BC), Texas State University, the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Austin Community College, and the University of Texas at Austin; and has worked for Walt Disney Imagineering, Maxis, and Electronic Arts/Pogo.com, among others. While in graduate school, his team created the game Skyrates, which won the Silver Gleemax Award at the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Jeremy also apparently has the distinction of being the first person to ever teach game design in Costa Rica.