Introducing the Game On Book Launch Event!

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!

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!

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!