As you can guess from the title of the book, this book is designed to introduce game developers to Lumberyard. Lumberyard is a new, open source 3D game engine that provides game developers with the ability to create live multiplayer games with the integration of key Amazon Web Services.
This book teaches the reader how to use Lumberyard to create a multiplayer 3D game with cloud computing and storage and with Twitch integration for its user engagement.
This book will start with an introduction to Lumberyard and an overview of its capabilities and integration options. Once the game engine is installed, the book guides the reader through the creation of an immersive game world with characters. Animations and audio will be added to help bring the game to life. External interactions will be explored to support live multiplayer game play, data storage, user engagement, and backend support.
Chapter 1, Welcome to the Lumberyard, will give you an initial look at Lumberyard and why it is unique among other game engines. We install the game engine and explore the user interface.
Chapter 2, Planning Your Game in the Lumberyard, will look into Lumberyard's beta release history and explore how that impacts your development efforts. We will also preview game functionality that we will create in subsequent chapters, look at game design for Lumberyard games, and explore how to plan the development process.
Chapter 3, Constructing an Immersive 3D Game World, will help you create a game world with trees, a river, hills, mountain, light sources, and shadows. In order to test our game, we will create a player-character and a camera.
Chapter 4, Creating 3D Characters, will help you to add 3D characters to a game. We also explore Geppetto and its user interface.
Chapter 5, Animating Your Characters, will examine the process of animating our game characters using Mannequin, Lumberyard's animation tool. This chapter covers Mannequin's user interface and its functionality.
Chapter 6, Creating Gameplay, will help in making your game interactive. In order to do, we need to create gameplay components. That is the focus of this chapter along with an introduction to Flow Graphs and the Flow Graph User Interface.
Chapter 7, Creating Multiplayer Gameplay, will examine the requirements of creating a multiplayer game in Lumberyard. We will also explore Amazon GameLift.
Chapter 8, Bringing Your Game to Life with Audio and Sound Effects, will explore Lumberyard's Audio System. We will look at the complexity of Lumberyard audio and examine the components of the Lumberyard Audio System.
Chapter 9, Employing Cloud Computing and Storage, further explores Amazon Web Servicesand reviews two additional Web Services: Cloud Canvas and Amazon Simple Storage Service.
Chapter 10, Engaging With Users Using Twitch, will take a singular look at Twitch, the Amazon Web Service that allows people to watch live game streaming. You will learn how to implement Twitch functionality for in-game user interactions.
Chapter 11, Providing Your Game to the World, will provide you with an overview of the steps necessary to publish your game once it is completed. Specifically, we will look at game builds, how to test them, debug them, and release them.
Chapter 12, Stretching Your Lumberyard Wings, will explore various possibilities with Lumberyard, beyond the basics. We will explore concepts, such as Virtual Reality (VR), the Waf Build System, Lumberyard's cinematics System, System Streaming, and Memory Handling. We will also explore two additional Amazon Web Services (Simple Query Service and Simple Notification Service).
This book is intended for use alongside a computer running Lumberyard. The Lumberyard Editor is therefore required to fully realize the benefits of this book. Lumberyard can run on a PC with the following minimum system requirements:
Windows 7 (64-bit) or Windows 10 (64-bit)
8 GB RAM
60 GB Hard Disk
3 GHz quad-core processor
DirectX 11 (DX11) compatible video card with at least 2 GB of video RAM (VRAM)
At the time of this book’s release, Lumberyard beta 1.5 was the most current version available. There might be slight differences in user interface components between the illustrations in this book and the actual Lumberyard interface.
This book caters to current and future game developers who have an interest in creating immersive, high-quality 3D games with live, multiplayer features. The book is written with the assumption that the reader will have some knowledge of a game design and software development. Experience with C++ is beneficial, but not required.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "There are five areas of the Mannequin interface."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "These files have a *.i_caf file extension."
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