Dr. Ashley Godbold is a programmer, game designer, artist, mathematician, and teacher. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, a Master of Science in Mathematics, a Bachelor of Science in Game Art and Design, and a Doctor of Computer Science in Emerging Media, where her dissertation research focused on educational video game design. She works full-time as a game developer and also runs a small indie/passion studio. She teaches college courses in Unity, 3ds Max, Adobe Flash, game design, and mathematics.
I would like to thank my husband, Kyle, and my daughter, Claire, for supporting me after I made the crazy decision to write a book and a dissertation at the same time. I would also like to thank my good friend, Danny Rich, for being the person with whom I initially set out to learn Unity and for helping me with character art in this book.
I'd also like to thank everyone at Packt Publishing for helping me through this process, particularly Smeet Thakkar, Prashanth G Rao, and Sushant Nadkar for all of their help through this process.
Simon Jackson has been a tinkerer, engineer, problem solver, and solution gatherer ever since his early years. In short, he loves to break things apart, figure out how they work, and then put them back together; usually better than before.
He started way back when with his first computer, the Commodore Vic20. It was simple, used a tape deck, and forced you to write programs in Basic or assembly language; those were fun times. From there, he progressed through the ZX Spectrum +2 and the joyous days of modern graphics, but still with the 30-minute load times from a trusty tape deck. Games were his passion even then, which led to many requests for another gaming machine, but Santa brought him an Amstrad 1640, his first PC. From there, his tinkering and building exploded, and that machine ended up being a huge monstrosity with so many add-ons and tweaked fixes. He was Frankenstein, and this PC became his own personal monster crafted from so many parts. Good times.
This passion led him down many paths, and he learned to help educate others on the tips and tricks he learned along the way; these skills have equipped him well for the future.
Today, he would class himself as a game development generalist. He works with many different frameworks, each time digging down and ripping them apart, and then showing whoever would listen through his blog, videos, and speaking events how to build awesome frameworks and titles. This has been throughout many generations of C++, MDX, XNA (what a breath of fresh air that was), MonoGame, Unity3D, The Sunburn Gaming Engine, HTML, and a bunch of other proprietary frameworks—he did them all. This gives him a very balanced view of how to build and manage many different types of multiplatform titles.
He didn't stop there as he regularly contributed to the MonoGame project, adding new features and samples, and publishing on NuGet. He also has several of his own open source projects and actively seeks any new and interesting ones to help with.
By day, he is a lowly lead technical architect working in the healthcare industry, seeking to improve patients' health and care through better software (a challenge to be sure). By night, he truly soars! Building, tinkering, and educating while trying to push game titles of his own. One day they will pay the bills, but until then, he still leads a double life.
I would like to thank my family above all, my wife, Caroline and my four amazing children (Alexander, Caitlin, Jessica, and Nathan), for putting up with me and giving me the space to write this title as well as my other extravagances—they truly lift me up and keep me sane. They are my rock, my shore, my world.
I would also like to thank Jamie Hales of PixelBalloon who generously donated some content for the Appendix and gave me new ideas and insights to look into.
A big shout out to all the guys who ran and helped me out with the Unity porting events, which I supported throughout the course of this book, namely Lee Stott, Simon Michael, Riaz Amhed, Louis Sykes, Ben Beagley, Josh Naylor, Mahmud Chowdhury, and Michael Cameron. Also, the Unity evangelists who were badgered throughout the events and were pumped for hidden details: Joe Robins and Andy Touch. Truly a great crowd to get game developers energized and their titles onto as many platforms as possible. Lots of weekends lost to writing, but the book was better, for they led to so many different experiences.
Finally, thanks to the reviewers of this title who kept me grounded and on target, although that didn't help to keep the page count low—thanks for your support guys.