We’re excited to introduce an amazing lineup of new and updated books as part of our Game On book launch!
We have four new and updated books as part of our Game On event:
- ARKit by Tutorials: The easiest and fastest way to get started building augmented reality apps in ARKit! You’ll build five great-looking, immersive apps in this book: tabletop poker dice, an immersive sci-fi portal, 3D face masking, location-based ad content, and a monster truck sim!
- Metal by Tutorials: Build your own low-level 3D game engine as you learn how to program for Metal, Apple’s framework for programming on the GPU. You’ll start at the beginning, learn all about rendering, lighting, textures, maps, post-processing, procedural generation, multipass and deferred rendering, and tie it all together at the end by integrating your engine with SpriteKit and SceneKit!
- Beat ’Em Up Game Starter Kit – Unity: The classic beat ’em up starter kit is back — for Unity! Create your own side-scrolling beat ’em up game in the style of such arcade classics as Double Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Golden Axe and Streets of Rage. This starter kit equips you with all tools, art and instructions you’ll need to create your own addictive mobile game for Android and iOS.
- Unity Games by Tutorials: We’re updating our classic text in building 2D and 3D games in Unity for Unity 2018.1. In this book, you’ll create four complete games from scratch: A twin-stick shooter, a first-person shooter, a tower defense game (with VR support!), and a 2D platfomer. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to make your own games for Windows, macOS, iOS, and more!
To help celebrate these books, and help you get your game on, we’re featuring some special launch pricing of these books, sharing free chapters from the books to give you a taste of what’s inside, and we’ll even have a giveaway where a few lucky readers can win themselves a copy of the books we’re featuring in our Game On event!
Here’s a quick overview of what’s in each book:
ARKit by Tutorials
Learn how to use Apple’s augmented reality framework, ARKit, to build five immersive, great-looking AR apps!
ARKit is Apple’s mobile AR development framework. With it, you can create an immersive, engaging experience, mixing virtual 2D and 3D content with the live camera feed of the world around you.
What sets ARKit apart from other AR frameworks, such as Vuforia, is that ARKit performs markerless tracking. ARKit instantly transforms any Apple device with an A9 or higher processor into a markerless AR-capable device. At this very moment, millions of Apple users already have a sophisticated AR device right in their pockets!
If you’ve worked with any of Apple’s other frameworks, you’re probably expecting that it will take a long time to get things working. But with ARKit, it only takes a few lines of code — ARKit does most of the the heavy lifting for you, so you can focus on what’s important: creating an immersive and engaging AR experience.
In this book, you’ll build five immersive, great-looking AR apps:
- Tabletop Poker Dice
- Immersive Sci-Fi Portal
- 3D Face Masking
- Location-Based Content
- Monster Truck Sim
Create your own personal portal in augmented reality!
By the end of the book, you’ll have a ton of great experience working inside the ARKit framework, including how to work with 3D objects and textures, how to add game physics, detect placeholders, how to work with face-based AR, how to work with blend shapes, record your experience with ReplayKit, and more!
We’ll be releasing three sample chapters from this book this week: keep watching the site for details!
About the Authors
Chris Language is a seasoned coder with 20+ years of experience, and the author of 3D Apple Games by Tutorials. He has fond memories of his childhood and his Commodore 64; more recently he started adding more good memories of life with all his Apple devices. By day, he fights for survival in the corporate jungle of Johannesburg, South Africa. By night he fights demons, dragons and zombies! For relaxation, he codes. You can find him on Twitter @ChrisLanguage.
Namrata Bandekar is a Software Engineer focusing on native iOS and Android development. When she’s not developing apps, she enjoys spending her time travelling the world with her husband, SCUBA diving and hiking with her dog. Say hi to Namrata on Twitter: @NamrataCodes.
Antonio Bello is still in love with software development, even after several decades spent writing code. Besides writing code that works and can be read by humans, his primary focus is learning; he’s actually obsessed by trying a bit of everything. When he’s not working, he’s probably sleeping (someone says he works too much), but from time to time he might be playing drums or composing music.
Tammy Coron is an independent creative professional and the host of Roundabout: Creative Chaos. She’s also the founder of Just Write Code. Find out more at tammycoron.com.
Metal by Tutorials
Build your own low-level game engine in Metal!
This book will introduce you to graphics programming in Metal — Apple’s framework for programming on the GPU. You’ll build your own game engine in Metal where you can create 3D scenes and build your own 3D games.
Metal is a unified application programming interface (API) for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. It’s unified because it applies to both 3D graphics and data-parallel computation paradigms. Metal is a low-level API because it provides programmers near-direct access to the GPU. Finally, Metal is a low-overhead API because it reduces the central processing unit (CPU) cost by multi-threading and pre-compiling of resources.
But beyond the technical definition, Metal is the most appropriate way to use the GPU’s parallel processing power to visualize data or solve numerical challenges. It’s also tailored to be used for machine learning, image/video processing or, as this book describes, graphics rendering.
Learn the details behind 3D rendering with Metal!
This book will introduce you to low-level graphics programming in Metal — Apple’s framework for programming on the graphics processing unit (GPU). As you progress through this book, you’ll learn many of the fundamentals that go into making a game engine and gradually put together your own engine. Once your game engine is complete, you’ll be able to put together 3D scenes and program your own simple 3D games. Because you’ll have built your 3D game engine from scratch, you’ll be able to customize every aspect of what you see on your screen.
This book is for intermediate Swift developers interested in learning 3D graphics or gaining a deeper understanding of how game engines work.
This book is currently in early access release with four full chapters available to get you started with Metal. When you purchase the digital edition, you’ll get advance access to the book while it’s in development, and you’ll get a free update to the complete digital edition of the book when it’s released! Estimated final release date is Fall, 2018.
We’ll be releasing a free sample chapter from this book this week on the site: keep watching for details!
About the Authors
Caroline Begbie is an indie iOS developer. When she’s not developing, she’s playing around with 2D and 3D animation software, or learning Arduino and electronics. She has previously taught the elderly how to use their computers, done marionette shows for pre-schools, and created accounting and stock control systems for mining companies.
Marius Horga is an iOS developer and Metal API blogger. He is also a computer scientist. He has more than a decade of experience with systems, support, integration and development. You can often see him on Twitter talking about Metal, GPGPU, games and 3D graphics. When he’s away from computers, he enjoys music, biking or stargazing.
Beat ’Em Up Game Starter Kit
Create your own side-scrolling beat ’em up game in the style of such arcade classics as Double Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Golden Axe and Streets of Rage!
This starter kit equips you with all tools, art and instructions you’ll need to create your own addictive mobile game for Android and iOS.
What could possibly be a more amusing way to burn time than slaughtering a horde of bad guys with trusty right and left hooks? Creating your very own beat ‘em up game, of course!
Beat ‘em up games have been around since the inception of 8-bit games and experienced their glory days when early console gaming and arcade gaming were all the rage — long before the world turned to pixels in the early part of the 21st century.
In the Unity version of this popular book, we’ll walk you through building a complete beat ’em up game on Unity.
With Unity’s great suite of 2D tools, it’s easy to build a game once and make it available to multiple platforms. The dark days of building for one platform, then painstakingly building your ingenious game on another engine for a different platform are over!
Get your retro on and build a classic beat ’em up game in Unity!
More than a book, this starter kit equips you with the tools, assets, fresh starter projects for each chapter, and step-by-step instructions to create an addictive beat ‘em up game for Android and iOS.
Each chapter builds on the last. You build out features one at a time, allowing you to learn at a steady, logical, and fun pace. Components were designed with reusability in mind so you can easily customize the resulting game.
This starter kit is for beginner to intermediate developers who have at least poked around Unity, perhaps even built a game, but need guidance around how to create a beat ‘em up game.
We’ll be releasing a free sample from one of the chapters of this book on the site next Monday, June 5, as a taste of what’s in this book.
And even more great news: if you’d already purchased our old Beat ’Em Up Game Starter Kit, SpriteKit edition, you quality for a 50% discount off of the regular price of the new Unity version of the book! To claim your special upgrade price, simply email support@razeware.com with your raywenderlich.com account name or email, and we’ll get you sorted.
About the Author
Jonathan Simbahan is a Philippines-based game programmer with a curious mind on a quest to make enjoyable games. Outside of game development, he finds simple joys in his numerous hobbies which are usually food-related.
Unity Games by Tutorials
Learn how to make games in Unity: a professional game engine used to create games like City Skylines, Hearthstone, the Long Dark, and more.
In this book, you’ll create four complete games from scratch:
- A twin-stick shooter
- A first-person shooter
- A tower defense game (with VR support!)
- A 2D platfomer
By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to make your own games for Windows, macOS, iOS, and more!
This book is for complete beginners to Unity, or for those who’d like to bring their Unity skills to a professional level. The book assumes you have some prior programming experience (in a language of your choice).
If you are a complete beginner to programming, we recommend you learn some basic programming skills first. A great way to do that is to watch our free Beginning C# with Unity series, which will get you familiar with programming in the context of Unity.
The games in the book are made with C#. If you have prior programming experience but are new to C#, don’t worry – the book includes an appendix to give you a crash course on C# syntax.
We’ll be releasing some free chapters from this book next week. Stay tuned to the site for details!
This book will be updated for Unity 2018.1 on June 6, 2018. If you already own this book, or buy it before June 6, 2018, you’ll receive a free update to the Unity 2018.1 version of the book when it’s released!
About the Authors
Mike Berg Mike Berg is a full-time game artist who is fortunate enough to work with many indie game developers from all over the world. When he’s not manipulating pixel colors, he loves to eat good food, spend time with his family, play games and be happy. You can check out his work at www.weheartgames.com.
Sean Duffy is a software engineer by day, and hobbyist game and tools developer by night. He loves working with Unity, and is also a Unity Asset Store developer with a special focus on 2D tools to help other game developers. Some of Sean’s more popular Unity Assets include his 2D Shooter Bullet and Weapon System and 2D Homing Missiles assets. You can find Sean on Twitter at @shogan85.
Brian Moakley leads the Unity team at raywenderlich.com and also produces video tutorials on iOS, Unity, and various other topics. When not writing or coding, Brian enjoys story driven first person shooters, reading genre fiction, and epic board game sessions with friends.
Eric Van de Kerckhove is a Belgian hobbyist game dev and has been so for more than 15 years.
He has made a fair share of games over the years, mostly free ones for fun and as learning experiences. Eric leads the Unity team at raywenderlich.com.”
Anthony Uccello Anthony is a software consultant who spends his night hours coding away making games in Unity. He is married and has 3 dogs and 3 cats.
Game On Book Launch Discounts
To celebrate the launch of these great books, we’re offering a limited-time launch discount pricing of $44.99 each! That’s a savings of $10 over the regular price!
All books are available in both PDF and EPUB formats, and come with all the source code for the book, including starter and final projects to help you on your learning path.
But don’t wait: these discounts are only good until the end of Friday, June 8. Get your start in game development and snag some sweet savings while you’re at it!
Game On Book Giveaway
We’re giving away three copies of each of the books in our Game On book launch event: ARKit by Tutorials, Metal by Tutorials, Beat ’Em Up Game Starter Kit, and Unity Games by Tutorials, to a few lucky readers.
To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment below and answer the following question:
We’ll select three winners at random for each book in our Game On lineup who leave a comment below before Friday, June 8. Get your entries in early — there are twelve chances to win, so your odds are really good on this one!
Where to Go From Here?
To recap, here’s the schedule of events for the Game On Book Launch:
- May 29: ARKit by Tutorials, Metal by Tutorials, Beat ’Em Up Game Starter Kit Unity books released!
- May 30: Metal free chapter released
- May 31: ARKit free chapter #1 and #2 released
- June 1: ARKit free chapter #3 released
- June 5: Beat ’Em Up Game Starter Kit free chapter released
- June 6: Unity Games by Tutorials updated to Unity 2018.1
- June 8: Giveaway and last day for discount!
If you’re looking to get started in Unity game development, or want to dig deeper into frameworks like ARKit and Metal, there’s no better way to boost your game building chops than through the books featured in our Game On book launch.
And don’t forget about the limited-time launch discount pricing of all four of these books — only available until the end of Friday, June 8. Don’t miss out!
We truly appreciate the support from all of our readers; you help make everything we do here at raywenderlich.com possible. Thanks for your support — and don’t forget to leave a comment below to enter the giveaway!
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