Purplelilgirl Makes Games
» Packt Publishing is about to give away 100 Unity3D books

Marketing blurb aside, the main point of that post is:

Here’s how it works.

1) Someday soon they will announce the release of Unity iOS Game Development Beginner’s Guide from the @packtexplorer twitter account using the code #unityiosRT

2) The first 100 unique re-tweets get the book free!

3) You need to be a follower of @packtexplorer (if you’re doing gamedev you probably should be following @packtexplorer anyway!) so that we can contact you.

4) You need to have a Packtpub account with your email and address so that we can credit your book to that account.

5) A couple of days after the announcement we will list the twitter @username of the 100 winners. If you’ve won, send a DM (twitter direct mail) to claim, including the email you used to set up your Packtpub account.

6) The book will appear on your account for you to download as a pdf or epub on your tablet or ereader.

So watch @packtexplorer for the announcement with the code word #unityiosRT

Quick Review: Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript Beginners Guide

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide
First thing I noticed about the book is, it’s written by a girl! The book is written by Rachel Cordone.
I don’t have any experience with Unreal, and am even a bit nervous to try it. But this book says its for beginners, so I decided to give it a read.
So far Chapter 1 has been very clear in teaching me how to install UDK. It gives very clear instructions (screenshots included!), and it’s not intimidating at all for a beginner like me.
I still have a lot of chapters to read, but so far, so good.

Quick Review: Unity iOS Essentials

I am currently reading “Unity iOS Essentials”, which I won from ManiacDev’s book giveaway contest.

Unity iOS Essentials

And so far, I find that this book seems to be all over the place and it inspires to be a Game Design book.

Why made me think so? Well, Chapter 1 is about Planning Ahead for an Unity iOS Game, it starts out pretty clear, it aims to give the readers a little heads up before they start their game, it mentions considerations such as terrain, lighting, audio, etc. And then it got to the Let’s Get Started part, which is pretty much the author make all sorts of game design suggestions, and sometimes he would suggest something and not really explain why, such as he said that Fog is not such a great idea, and he suggests that we use particles instead, but why? Why isn’t fog a good idea? He even mentioned that it adds ambiance, so why isn’t it a good idea? Also there is a whole chunk that he talks about teleportation (wut? o.O), which provides means for players to travel across our large levels. He could have ended that bit there, but he goes on to suggest different ways of doing teleportation, warp gates, trains, what nots. And then after being distracted by all those really not important stuff, he starts talking about culling. Now, culling is important (even the author says so). But the reader could have skipped that part (okay, at least I almost skipped that part because I was skipping the trying to skip the teleportation part).

Chapter 2 is called iOS Performance Guide, but like Chapter 1, instead of getting right down to it (the performance guide), he starts the chapter with different kinds of games that the reader can make. And briefly mention skybox and how we’re supposed to use a cube with reversed normals instead of the one that Unity came with (again, no explanation whatsoever on why we shouldn’t use the Unity one). And then some bits about how we should do our terrain (not the technical part, the design part of making a terrain). Some more bits about different game genres.And then suddenly, Unified Graphic Architecture and the other stuff that actually seems like the iOS Performance Guide.

Chapter 3 is called Advanced Game Concepts, but really the things covered in the chapter is not very advanced, it’s stuff about menus, interface, screen sizes, accelerometer, shaders and organizing your assets.

Chapter 4 is called Flyby Background. Can’t say anything about it, because I skipped it.

I’m after Chapter 5 because it’s about Scalable GUIs, which I happen to be working on right now. So far, it’s understandable, pretty easy to follow. But the way the code bits are edited makes it somewhat unreadable. Oh and don’t expect the code to work as is.

That’s where I am right now, there are still four more chapters that I haven’t read yet.

So far, my comment is, it’s all over the place.

Link: http://www.packtpub.com/unity-3d-essentials-for-ios-games/book

Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner’s Guide: Game #2

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on #AltDevBlogADay reviewing a Unity3D book written by Ryan Henson Creighton, Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner’s Guide (buy the book, it’s pretty good, so far), but I only gotten around to Chapter 4.

Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide

So for this blog post, I will go through some of the other chapters, particularly Chapter 5 and 6, which is about making a game called “Robot Repair”.

Chapter 5 will talk about GUI (graphical user interface, pronounced as “gooey”, like marshmallows). And we’ll be making an entire working 2D flip n’ match memory game in the GUI system.

So let’s get started!

First we open Unity and create a new project called “Robot Repair”, we don’t need to import Standard Assets, according to the boss (Mr. Author, Ryan Henson Creighton).

So we have an empty slate (este project).

A Unity scene is a big 3D world, but we would be ignoring that for now. We will be using the GUI layer, which is like “a sheet of glass” in front of our 3D world.

We will be making 2 scenes for this game. A scene is like a level or a screen in our game. So two scenes, one for the title and one for the game game.

(how organized are we)

So we are making the title screen first.

(tada!)

Of course, so far the TitleGUI script is still empty.

And we type some code (este copy paste from the book):

And we get this:

And if you clicked the button, you get a lil message:

(yeah)

The book came with some code files and assets for each chapter, packed as Unity packages, just double click on the file and it’ll import it to your project.

For the title screen, the author has prepared a cute image that we will add as a GUITexture, and so we get this:

(oh, we also changed the position of the button, so it’s front and well, not really center)

And then hook the button to some code that will bring us to the game:

Application.LoadLevel(“game”);

(yes, this short little code will bring us to the next scene, if we have our scenes added to our build settings)

Lalala… okay, time to make the actual game game.

We go to the game scene (just double click on the scene in the Project panel).

And we’ll make a GameScreen game object and a GameScript script (like what we did with the title screen).

Ooh… what codes will we fill this new script with? *copy paste some codes from the book* Okay, and read up on the explanations too.

And we get this!

(whee)

And then we are done with one chapter. Look at us, pretty good, huh.

iPhone and iOS books Giveway!

So Packt Publishing recently released a couple of iPhone and iOS books:

iPhone JavaScript Cookbook

iPhone JavaScript Cookbook

Link: http://www.packtpub.com/iphone-javascript-cookbook/book

Core Data iOS Essentials
 

Core Data iOS Essentials

Link: http://www.packtpub.com/core-data-ios-essentials/book

Cocoa and Objective-C Cookbook

https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/productview/0386OT_Cocoa%20and%20OBjective-C%20Cookbookcov.jpg

Link: http://www.packtpub.com/cocoa-and-objective-c-cookbook/book

And the wonderful people that had been giving me free books, asked me to hold a giveaway contest, so that well, you guys can get them too.

How to join? All you have to do is visit the 3 book pages and mention one feature about a particular book that makes you want to own it.

You can leave a reply here on Tumblr (using reply or Disqus comments) or tweet me (@purplelilgirl).

So um yeah, that’s it. I will be giving away one of each book. :)

Core Data iOS Essentials
Core Data iOS Essentials

Overview of Core Data iOS Essentials

  • Covers the essential skills you need for working with Core Data in your applications.
  • Particularly focused on developing fast, light weight data-driven iOS applications.
  • Builds a complete example application. Every technique is shown in context.
  • Completely practical with clear, step-by-step instructions.
  • eBook available as PDF and ePub downloads.

Link: http://www.packtpub.com/core-data-ios-essentials/book

I got the proof copy of my NaNoWriMo 2010 novel from CreateSpace :)


I got the proof copy of my NaNoWriMo 2010 novel from CreateSpace :)

» An Ex-Pixar Designer Creates Astounding Kids' Book On iPad
» Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner's Guide

A new book on Cocos2D by Pablo Ruiz.

From the website:

Overview of Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner’s Guide

  • A cool guide to learning cocos2d with iPhone to get you into the iPhone game industry quickly
  • Learn all the aspects of cocos2d while building three different games
  • Add a lot of trendy features such as particles and tilemaps to your games to captivate your players
  • Full of illustrations, diagrams, and tips for building iPhone games, with clear step-by-step instructions and practical examples

Review coming soon.