Alan Thorn – författare

Get ahead of the game with Unity 4.

The Unity engine is the tool of choice for many indie and AAA game developers. Unity 4 Fundamentals gives readers a head start on the road to game development by offering beginners a comprehensive, step by step introduction to the latest Unity 4 engine. The author takes a theory-to-practice approach to demonstrate what Unity 4 has to offer which includes:

Get ahead of the game with Unity 4.

The Unity engine is the tool of choice for many indie and AAA game developers. Unity 4 Fundamentals gives readers a head start on the road to game development by offering beginners a comprehensive, step by step introduction to the latest Unity 4 engine. The author takes a theory-to-practice approach to demonstrate what Unity 4 has to offer which includes:

Looking to become more efficient using Unity?

How to Cheat in Unity 5 takes a no-nonsense approach to help you achieve fast and effective results with Unity 5. Geared towards the intermediate user, HTC in Unity 5 provides content beyond what an introductory book offers, and allows you to work more quickly and powerfully in Unity. Packed full with easy-to-follow methods to get the most from Unity, this book explores time-saving features for interface customization and scene management, along with productivity-enhancing ways to work with rendering and optimization. In addition, this book features a companion website at www.alanthorn.net, where you can download the book’s companion files and also watch bonus tutorial video content.

Looking to become more efficient using Unity?

How to Cheat in Unity 5 takes a no-nonsense approach to help you achieve fast and effective results with Unity 5. Geared towards the intermediate user, HTC in Unity 5 provides content beyond what an introductory book offers, and allows you to work more quickly and powerfully in Unity. Packed full with easy-to-follow methods to get the most from Unity, this book explores time-saving features for interface customization and scene management, along with productivity-enhancing ways to work with rendering and optimization. In addition, this book features a companion website at www.alanthorn.net, where you can download the book’s companion files and also watch bonus tutorial video content.

Blender is a vast and customizable 3D-modeling application used by many artists across creative industries, from television to games. This newest book, in Alan Thorn’s How to Cheat series, offers insightful and bite-sized power-tips to help you develop Blender mastery. More than five hundred figures illustrate interesting shortcuts and clever ways to improve your Blender workflow. A companion website at http://www.alanthorn.net provides bonus content, including videos and resources to help sharpen your skills further. How to Cheat in Blender 2.7x is for Blender users of all levels, offering time-saving tips and powerful techniques to increase your productivity.

Key Features

In Learn Unity for 2D Game Development, targeted at both game development newcomers and established developers, experienced game developer Alan Thorn shows you how to use the powerful Unity engine to create fun and imaginative 2D games. 

Written in clear and accessible language, Learn Unity for 2D Game Development will show you how to set up a step-by-step 2D workflow in Unity, how to build and import textures, how to configure and work with cameras, how to establish pixel-perfect ratios, and all of this so you can put that infrastructure to work in a real, playable game. Then the final chapters show you how to put what you''ve already made to work in creating a card-matching game, plus you''ll learn how to optimize your game for mobile devices.

Whether you are a student, an indie developer, or a season game dev professional, you''ll find helpful C# examples of how to build intelligent enemies, create event systems and GUIs, develop save-game states, and lots more.

You''ll understand and apply powerful programming concepts such as singleton classes, component based design, resolution independence, delegates, and event driven programming.

By the end of the book, you will have a complete first person shooter game up and running with Unity. Plus you''ll be equipped with the know-how and techniques needed to deploy your own professional-grade C# games.

If you already know a bit of C# and you want to improve your Unity skills, this is just the right book for you.

Are you a Unity developer looking to switch to the Godot engine quickly? If so, this no-nonsense book is your guide to mastering the most popular open-source game engine. 

Godot is a completely free game engine for creating high-quality 2D and 3D games that can be launched on multiple platforms. You''ll see how to transition seamlessly from Unity to Godot, getting up and running quickly and effectively, using practical case studies. In addition to building functional worlds from meshes and physical interactions, you''ll work with reusable assets, such as textures. 

The book then moves on to lighting and rendering 2D and 3D scenes with baked and real-time lighting. You''ll also work with navigation and path-finding for NPCs, and see how to create save-game states with JSON. With Moving from Unity to Godot you’ll be ready to create amazing 2D and 3D games that will supercharge your business. 

What You Will Learn

Who This Book is For

Blender is a vast and customizable 3D-modeling application used by many artists across creative industries, from television to games. This newest book, in Alan Thorn’s How to Cheat series, offers insightful and bite-sized power-tips to help you develop Blender mastery. More than five hundred figures illustrate interesting shortcuts and clever ways to improve your Blender workflow. A companion website at http://www.alanthorn.net provides bonus content, including videos and resources to help sharpen your skills further. How to Cheat in Blender 2.7x is for Blender users of all levels, offering time-saving tips and powerful techniques to increase your productivity.

Key Features

An example-based practical guide to get you up and running with Unity 5.x

About This Book

Who This Book Is For

The ideal target audience for this book would be game developers. They need not have previous experience with Unity since this book will cover all the basics about game development with unity. This would also be a very good resource for Unity developers who want to brush up their basic Unity skills and also get up and running with creating interesting games with Unity 5.x.

What You Will Learn

In Detail

Unity is an exciting and popular engine in the game industry. Throughout this book, you''ll learn how to use Unity by making four fun game projects, from shooters and platformers to exploration and adventure games.

Unity 5 By Example is an easy-to-follow guide for quickly learning how to use Unity in practical context, step by step, by making real-world game projects. Even if you have no previous experience of Unity, this book will help you understand the toolset in depth. You''ll learn how to create a time-critical collection game, a twin-stick space shooter, a platformer, and an action-fest game with intelligent enemies. In clear and accessible prose, this book will present you with step-by-step tutorials for making four interesting games in Unity 5 and explain all the fundamental concepts along the way. Starting from the ground up and moving toward an intermediate level, this book will help you establish a strong foundation in making games with Unity 5.

Style and approach

This book would be a very unique resource for any game developer who wants to get up and running with Unity. The unique example based approach will take you through the most basic games towards the more complex ones and will gradually build your skill level.