Beginning Game Development with Amazon Lumberyard Create 3D Games Using Amazon Lumberyard and Lua

Create stunning 3D games in a short amount of time using Amazon Lumberyard, a free and exciting game development platform. This book is a ground-up, out-of-the-box tutorial on 3D game development and programming with Lua and Amazon Lumberyard with little or no game development experience required. 

Beginning Game Development with Amazon Lumberyard walks you through the user interface of the Amazon Lumberyard engine; teaches you how to develop detailed terrain using heightmaps, megatextures, weather, and vegetation; and takes you through exporting the game for distribution. The book will show you how to create a player as well as enemies while not getting bogged down with third-party tools for animation or model creation. You will also work with simple physics, colliders, meshes, weather generation, Lua scripting, user interface development, and much more.

By the end of the book, you will be able to create many different types of video games using the Amazon Lumberyard engine and even have a completed project ready to release or put in your portfolio.

What You Will Learn

• Discover the mechanics and terminology of game development
• Familiarize yourself with the Amazon Lumberyard game engine in detail
• Modify game scripts using the Lua language
• Discover how to optimally structure game layers

Who This Book is For

Developers, programmers, and would-be game designers who have long wanted to dip their toes into the world of game development but have found other game engines and platforms to have too high a barrier to entry.

Chapter Goal: This chapter will walk the reader through the process of downloading and installing the correct required components necessary to create their game.

Subtopics:

·         Downloading, Installing, and Setting up Lumberyard

Chapter Goal: This chapter will focus on introducing the reader how to navigate the Amazon Lumberyard engine, keyboard shortcuts, pane navigation, and other terminology.

Subtopics:

·         Pane Navigation

·         Useful hotkeys

·         Terminology of Engine-related topics

Chapter 3: Creating your first Project

Chapter Goal: This chapter will teach the user how to create a project, decide which default project setting they would like to start out with, as well as detail the differences between projects and levels.

Sub Topics :

·         Projects and the myriad of default project settings

·         Projects & Levels : What’s the difference?

Chapter Goal: Now that the reader has a project and a level created, their character will need some terrain to interact with. This chapter will focus on how to generate terrain. This will be a long chapter.

Sub - Topics:

·         Heightmaps

·         Mega Textures and Textures

·         Vegetation

·         Detailing

·         Time of Day & Sun Patterns

Chapter Goal: This chapter will walk the reader through the creation of a player, buildings, roads, and all other various props that will go in their video game. This chapter will discuss how to create child entities within others and how to create re-usable entities, known as slices.

·         Entities

·         Slices

Chapter Goal: This chapter will walk the reader through the component editor. This is an important chapter because it introduces meshes, colliders, weather, simple physics and other necessary elements to the entities the reader created in Chapter 5.

Sub - Topics:

·         Meshes

·         Colliders

Chapter Goal: This chapter will show the reader how to create the enemy of the game, describe how the enemy will interact with the player, and how the reader can duplicate this enemy.

Sub Topics:

·        Your First Enemy

·        Introduction to Enemy Artificial Intelligence

·        Cloning the Enemy

Chapter Goal: This chapter will walk the reader through editing lua scripts to have characters, enemy characters, and gameplay do their bidding.

Sub Topics:

·         Gravity

·         Lua Scripting Introduction

Chapter Goal: This chapter will detail how the reader can add some spice to their game. This will go over how to add particles, other light sources, sounds, and other polishing features to their levels.

Sub - Topics:

·         Light Sources

·         Particles

·         Sounds

Chapter Goal: Game Over! Without seeing these two words at the end of the game, was it really a game at all? This chapter will go over how to create a user interface, so the reader can create a start menu, as well as a “game over” - or “mission complete” screen.

Sub-Topics:

·         User Interfaces

o   Start Menu

·         Heads-up Display

Chapter Goal: This chapter will show the reader how to export their game to an executable to share with friends and family – or many even to sell it.

Sub-Topics:

·        Compiling your game for release

·        Where and how to distribute your game

Jaken Herman is a software engineer living in Texas. Jaken holds a bachelor of science in computer science with a focus on software engineering from Sam Houston State University. Outside of university, Jaken worked as a software engineering contractor at NASA. He has worked with many different and new technologies and has an ever-expanding wealth of information on all topics related to programming. In game development, he has academic experience as well as hands-on hobbyist experience having created many mobile-based games, a side-scrolling platformer, and a racing game.