Looking for a fun project for the weekend? How about learning Minecraft® mod development in 24 hours?
Sams Teach Yourself Minecraft Mod Development in 24 Hours will help you do just that! Each chapter is an “hour” and explains the entire process from “Setting up the Minecraft® development environment” to “What’s Next?” and all you need in between. At the end of each hour is a hands-on, try-it-yourself activity, workshops, and exercises which will help you hone your new skills writing mods. Java programming basics are explained as you move through each hour, making it a great way to learn to program.
Want to learn to make flaming cows, flying creepers or teleportation in Minecraft®? Learn to Program with Minecraft Plugins can help you do that! This book also starts at the beginning as you learn to write a Java program. Besides Java, you’ll also learn to use CanaryMod and to backup your code using Git.
Interested in expanding your game programming skills beyond creating flaming cows? Ready to design an entire game by yourself? Fundamentals of Game Design will walk you through the different types of games, design and development, how to make your game accessible to a variety of audiences and how to make money from the games you’ve created. Have experience with HTML? Check out HTML5 Games: Creating Fun with HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL.
Another resource which will walk you through creating your own game – from beginning to end – is Game Development with Blender. You will get an introduction to 3D computer graphics as well as Blender in general. There are chapters devoted to animation, graphics, Python scripting, and more.
If you are ready to move on to designing mobile games, check out Holistic Mobile Game Development with Unity. The principles of art, design and code are covered and you’ll gain the multidisciplinary skills you’ll need in the independent mobile games industry. You’ll learn the process for both iOS and Android mobile devices from design to publication in the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Whatever your skill level or interest in designing and programming games – we have the resources you need!
Engineering Library QA76.73 .J38 H848 2014
Resources:
Koene, Jimmy. 2015. Sams teach yourself Minecraft mod development in 24 hours. Indianapolis, Indiana : Sams. Engineering Library QA76.76 .C672 K64 2015
Seidelin, Jacob. 2014. HTML5 games: creating fun with HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL. Chichester, West Suxxex, United Kingdom : Wiley. Engineering Library QA76.76 .C672 S433 2014
Adams, Ernest. 2014. Fundamentals of game design. [Berkeley, California] : New Riders. Engineering Library AQ76.76 C672 A322 2014
Felinto, Dalai. 2014. Game development with Blender. Boston, MA : Cengage Learning PTR. Engineering Library QA76.76 .C672 F45 2014
Baillie-de Byl, Penny. 2014. Holistic mobile game development with Unity: an all-in-one guide to implementing mechanics, art design, and programming for iOS and Android mobile games. Burlington, MA : Focal Press. Engineering Library QA76.76 .C672 B336 2014.
Other Resources:
Thorn, Alan. 2015. How to cheat in Unity 5: tips and tricks for game development. Burlintong, MA : Focal Press. Electronic Library Resource.
Canary: Introducing Canary: the hMod Legacy. Minecraft Forum. 2005-2015.
Bunyan, Karl. 2015. Build an HTML5 game: a developer’s guide with CSS and JavaScript. San Francisco : No Starch Press. Engineering Library QA76.76 .C672 B856 2012
Okita, Alex. 2015. Learning C# programming with Unity 3D. Boca Raton : CRC Press. Engineering Library QA76.76 .C672 O43 2015.
There is little doubt that the open access (OA) model for publishing scientific literature has revolutionized the academic approach to publishing and the publication industry itself. Since the advent of OA publishing there has been an exponential proliferation of OA journals which currently number greater than 10,000 (https://doaj.org). I personally receive countless requests to serve on the editorial boards of these journals which I typically ignore and promptly delete. Academic institutions have embraced the OA model since traditional journals can cost as much as $20,000 per year for an institutional subscription. Indeed, universities such as the University of Iowa offer incentives in the form of payment of publication fees for their faculty to publish in OA journals. Indeed my trainees and I have benefitted from these incentives and have published several papers in OA journals within the last several years. One of these (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24672806), published two years ago in the reputable Dove Press journal Hypoxia is currently the most viewed and downloaded paper since the journal’s inception. Clearly this has provided a brilliant showcase for our work and we have benefitted from the university’s OA policy. Open access allows free and ready access to its readers, while passing the costs of production and publication off to the contributors of literary content. And while this “pay to publish” approach opens opportunities for investigators to quickly and broadly disseminate their findings, OA publishing also has a dark side. This dark side is manifest in the proliferation of “predatory” journals that accept work that may be of questionable quality and significance. Such journals should be actively avoided and are identified on Beall’s list of predatory journals which can be found at http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/. One of the perils of the pay to publish model are the presentation of opportunities for blatant conflicts of interest in the publication process http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1307577). For example, pharma businesses might take advantage of the lower rejection rates and relaxed journal standards in OA journals to publish prematurely or incompletely to promote the interests of their company. Another troubling aspect of the proliferating OA model is the pressure to provide qualified competent reviewers from a limited pool of knowledgeable experts, the demands on whose time are typically already overextended, to review the avalanche of submitted manuscripts. Since the material in OA journals is disseminated digitally there are essentially no page limits and so the numbers of papers and rate of papers published is astronomical. Already more than 2 million papers are published in the greater than 10,000 OA journals mentioned above. Almost certainly the rigor of review that is afforded these papers is on average substantially below that of traditional journals. These acknowledgements appear to have led to an improved perception of the value of publications in traditional journals for the communication of highly reliable and reproducible results. Other digital resources such as ArXiv (http://arxiv.org/) enable investigators to disseminate their own findings before they are peer-reviewed in pre-print form known as e-prints, so the information can be distributed to interested parties without delays or compromising the quality of the finally published work. And while ArXiv may have downsides of its own (http://mathoverflow.net/questions/65090/downsides-of-using-the-arxiv) it may present a viable alternative to OA publishing, and at minimal or no expense. Hopefully this discussion highlighting the two-faced nature of OA publishing will leave the reader with a better sense of risks and benefits of both publishing in and reading from OA journals.
