………IGDPD Home Page………

The 3rd Edition is Here!!!

I am still in the process of updating this site for the third edition of the book. Thank you for your patience.
— Jeremy

Welcome to the website for Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development, 3rd Edition. Here, you will find a page for each chapter of the book that contains any additional information or materials you need, including demo software, lecture slides, and starting files for some of the later tutorials. These are currently for the 2nd edition, but I’m updating them as quickly as I can.

Important Notes on the Third Edition

The 3rd Edition Was Released in September, 2022
It is available directly from Pearson in both digital and print formats as well as other resellers like Amazon.

Which Version of Unity Should I Download?

For the 3rd edition of the book, you should download the latest 2020.3.xx LTS version. Unity’s Long Term Support (LTS) versions are supported with update releases for many years, which makes them the perfect platform on which to build a book. Version 2020.3 LTS is very stable and is one of the best versions of Unity to learn. Though version 2021.3 LTS has also been released, version 2020 was much more stable when I was writing the book.

What is New in the Third Edition?

Since 2017, when the second edition was published, Unity has grown and changed considerably. To give you the best possible book for learning Unity, I had to change this book as well. Some of the major changes include:

• About 400 additional pages – With the inclusion of the online appendices, the additional content in this book is longer than the entirety of some books on learning to program. Unity has grown significantly over the years, and you need to know more to be able to use it well. I have added tons of content to the game prototypes so that you can experience more of the expanded features of Unity. Among the new chapters I have added is a new chapter explaining Data-Oriented Design, a new approach to Unity programming that can drastically increase performance and efficiency but requires a completely different mindset from the Object Oriented Programming that has been taught at universities for the last thirty years.
• Improved, more polished tutorials – The first edition contained eight rather small tutorials that provided a good introduction to Unity at the time. Now that Unity has more capabilities, I have worked these into the tutorials as well. Of the five tutorials in Part III of this book, three are now spread across two chapters (a space shooter, a card game, and an action/adventure game). For each of these, the first chapter sets up the underlying technology and gets you to a rough prototype, while the second chapter expands the prototype into a first playable, a more polished version of the game that is ready to be shown to others for feedback.
• Better code throughout – As I have improved as a programmer, so has the code in this book. Each of the Part III prototypes are designed to be a framework upon which you could build your own games, so code throughout the book has been revised to be more understandable and extensible. Additionally, immense care has been taken to implement consistent syntax coloring throughout the book, making the code clearer and easier to read. In the many places where you are modifying existing scripts, the areas that you must modify have also been made clearer.
• Coding Challenges – One wholly new aspect of the book is the online Coding Challenges, which are designed to aid your transition from following the book tutorials to creating your own games from scratch. Each challenge is a complete Unity game project with much of the key code missing. In the place of this code are comments that explain what the code should do and how it should work. Replacing the missing code draws upon your experience from this book and helps you to better internalize what you learn here. I have used these successfully in my classes for a few years to great effect!
• Unity 2020.3 LTS – Unity’s new commitment to Long Term Support (LTS) releases means that they will make only bug-fix and security fixes to LTS releases and will avoid any changes that could break code or tutorials like those in this book. By committing the book to version 2020.3 LTS, I avoid many of the issues that could come up if you tried to use a more recent version of Unity with these tutorials. 2020.3 LTS was released in mid-2021 and will be updated monthly until mid-2023, but it will be a viable, solid release for years after that.
• Better online tools – Many of the online tools that I offer you through this book are the same tools that I developed for my own game development projects and the classes I teach. Hundreds of students have used these tools for dozens of projects, and I have improved them every semester. This now even includes an online code-checker that can help you find issues in your code at any point in one of the tutorials.

These are just a few of the many improvements that I have worked into the book since the previous edition. While the game design chapters in Part I and the C# programming chapters in Part II have several revisions throughout, the game prototypes in Part III and beyond contain the most drastic changes. I have put well over 1,000 hours into improving this book to make it the best possible way for you to learn Unity. It contains as much content as I could possibly fit into it (more pages than they would allow me to print!), and I know it will be a great resource for you.

Navigating This Site

In the menu at the left, there are sections for each of the three major parts of the book. Click on a part name to see all the chapters that it contains. There is also a section for the first edition of the book that includes updates to allow you to use the first edition with Unity 5.

Thank You!

Thank you very much for purchasing the book. I sincerely hope it helps to accelerate your progress towards game design and development. If you have any comments or questions about the book, feel free to use the Contact link to send me an email about it.

                                                 — Jeremy Gibson Bond