The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners [With CDROM]

Über den Autor

Previous books: Jacob Habgood: None Mark Overmars: M.H. Overmars, The design of dynamic data structures, Lect. Notes in Comp. Science 156, Springer-Verlag, 1983. J.-P. Laumond, M.H. Overmars (Eds.), Algorithms for Robotic Motion and Manipulation, A. K. Peters, Boston, 1997. M. de Berg, M. van Kreveld, M.H. Overmars, O. Schwarzkopf, Computational Geometry, Algorithms and Applications, Springer-Verlag, 1997. M. de Berg, M. van Kreveld, M.H. Overmars, O. Schwarzkopf, Computational Geometry, Algorithms and Applications, second edition, Springer-Verlag, 2000. Jacob Habgood comes from the UK games industry where he spent seven years writing console games for Gremlin Interactive and Infogrames/Atari. During this time he contributed to a wide range of titles and led the programming teams on MicroMachines (PS2, X-Box and GameCube) and Hogs of War (PlayStation). He was fortunate enough to be part of the core design team on Hogs and had significant input on the final shape of the game. Hogs was a hugely successful European title with initial UK sales in excess of 100,000 units; it remained at number one in the German software charts for six weeks. In 2003 he left the games industry to take up a Ph.D. scholarship, exploring the educational potential of computer games at the University of Nottingham. As a student of the interdisciplinary Learning Sciences Research Institute, his work is rooted in the study of educational and psychological theories of learning as well as contemporary game design. Jacob's research is all done in the classroom, and has involved a number of studies teaching children and teenagers how to create their own computer games at after-school clubs and holiday workshops. One of these workshops was recently featured in EDGE Magazine (Christmas 2004, p13) and Jacob is in the process of writing up this first phase of his research for publication. Jacob has a passion for making computer games and is keen to promote it as an educational activity in schools through his website: www.gamelearning.net. He has a wide network of friends in the gaming industry, and is quite successful at recruiting them to help out with his research projects. He is also married to a practicing schoolteacher whose talents and experience always prove an invaluable input to his work. Mark Overmars is a full professor in Computer Science at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Here he heads the center for Geometry, Imaging, and Virtual Environments (www.give.nl), a group of about 25 researchers in computer science, dealing with issues such as multimedia, graphics, motion planning, and simulation. He has written over 200 research papers. He has also written a research monograph and a widely used text book on Computational Geometry, both published by Springer-Verlag. One of his research domains is computer games. He is one of the founders of the Utrecht Platform for Game Education and Research (www.upgear.nl) and teaches courses on computer game design at Utrecht University. He has a keen interest in the use of game design as a vehicle for education on all levels. He has given workshops on game design for many different audiences, like 10-year olds, high school students, college students, and high-school teachers. He is actively involved in projects aiming to use game design in high-school education in the Netherlands. Mark is the author of many software packages directed towards children. In particular, he is the author of the Game Maker software package, which will be used as the development tool in this book. Game Maker was originally designed as a tool to teach children about the basics of object-oriented design and to raise their interest in computer science. The package though has developed into a full-blown authoring package for games. But it kept its education inclination even though the users might not realize this, making it very suitable for educational use as well.