Introduction To Game Design Development

IGDPD Home Page

Welcome to the website for Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development, 2nd 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.

Important Notes on the Book

The Third Edition Will Be Released in 2021
You may have seen announcements (on Amazon and elsewhere) that the third edition would be released in 2020. Though that was the original plan, the transitional state of GUI, DOTS, and other aspects in the current Unity LTS version (2019.4 LTS) meant that any book published in 2020 would be out of date by 2021. I instead chose to wait until 2021 (and Unity version 2020.2 LTS) to publish the book, ensuring that it will be usable for as long as possible.

Which Version of Unity Should I Download?
For the second edition of the book, I highly recommend downloading either of these versions:

2018.4 LTS – This version is a bit different but will still be actively supported and updated monthly by Unity until Spring 2021. This is the one I use in my intro programming class at Michigan State.
or 2017.4 LTS – This is the version that matches the text almost perfectly. It was last updated in May 2020, so it's still pretty recent. The Unity Certified Programmer exam is also still based on Unity 2017 (I made the official Coursera prep course for Unity).

I do not recommend any of the 2019 or 2020 versions of Unity for use with this book. Massive changes in several systems (GUI and Input in particular) in 2019 and 2020 would make it significantly more difficult to follow the text, and the Unity TECH release version (currently 2020) includes many new features that have not yet been fully stabilized.

Changes to the Second Edition
Every chapter has numerous changes, some subtle, and some major. In all, I spent over 1,000 hours improving and updating the book, and I believe the new version is much better (it's also 80 pages longer). Here are some key changes:

All code and tutorials have been updated, adding numbered steps and colored syntax.
Unity has changed significantly in the years since 1st edition, and everything is now updated to Unity 2017.
The final two tutorials from the 1st edition have been replaced with one that is much better (it's a remake of the first level of The Legend of Zelda for NES, with the addition of a grappling hook!).
A few things that readers and friends had pointed out as confusing have been simplified and clarified.

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

Unity 2018.2.2 – Camera.main Bug

In Unity 2018.2.2, sometimes when creating a Camera, the tag of the Camera is set to "Untagged" instead of "MainCamera". As a result, any references to Camera.main will cause Null Reference Exceptions.
To remedy this, all you need to do is set the tag of the Main Camera to MainCamera.

Small Unity 2017+ Issues

The second edition was written before Unity announced or released their Tilemap engine for 2D games, so the Dungeon Delver tutorial (Ch. 35) uses an engine that I wrote instead. However, the Unity Tilemap engine does cause scripts of specific names to have unique icons. These include "Tile", "GameManager", and others. If you see a strange icon for these scripts, it's nothing to worry about.