What this book covers

Chapter 1, The Anatomy of Games, explains the different components of gameplay and their functionalities. We will explore what games are made up of–the atoms of gaming experiences and how they are used.

Chapter 2, Who or What am I? - Understanding the Player, tells the readers that in designing and developing a gamified application, it's very important to study and understand the audience, and how they behave as players. Therefore, in this chapter, the reader will be provided with different tools to specifically engage his target audience. More importantly, the readers will learn how to understand and to design these specific tools inside Unity.

Chapter 3, An Engaged Player is a Happy Player, will discuss ways to provide feedback and reinforcement as well as tracking the progress of the player during their engagement with the application. In addition, it will describe ways to actively engage players throughout the experience.

Chapter 4, An Organized Chaos - Getting Ideas Out of Your Head and on to Paper, will explain how to design a gamified application before starting to create a final version. The reader will learn different and specific techniques for process of creating gamified applications in different contexts, allowing the reader to have more tools to face the challenge. Furthermore, it is also shown how it is possible to use Unity during the process to help the reader to create helpful tools in Unity to generate new ideas.

Chapter 5, Sculpting the Conceptual Beast, shows that having a hard copy of the application the reader has in mind can avoid many restructuring and recording later. Therefore, this chapter introduces a series of tools to the reader for creating a physical prototype of the application. At this stage, the reader will get an idea of how to test it with its target audience to avoid wasting time and programming resources later on in the process. This will also extend what the reader has done in previous chapters, but add more functionality.

Chapter 6, Breathing Life to Your First Creation: Creating and Importing Assets for Your Application!, will show the reader how to gather all the concepts from the previous chapter and get them working together inside Unity. By the end of this chapter the reader will have acquired the right skills to implement all of them inside Unity.

Chapter 7, Get Your Motor Running, will explain to the reader how to implement various game elements into Unity that relate to the project. This provides the basic foundation and practical skills that the reader will need later on when developing the project. Each game element will be provided with a clear explanation of how to create it within Unity.

Chapter 8, Break, Destroy, and Rebuild - The Art of Playtesting and Iteration, will reveal methods of playtesting and iteration, in order to improve the design  of their project. It will suggest ways to test, what to look for and what to pay attention to during this stage.

Chapter 9, Graduating Your Project to Completion, will wrap up everything that we have done as part of the project. It will make sure that the project is ready to publish and that the reader has developed all the necessary skills to get it to the final stage. It will also discuss different marketing techniques and approaches to online social networking services to give a gamified application the best possible chance for success across a wide audience.

Chapter 10, Being the Best That You Can Be!, will consider everything together that the reader has learned during the process and make recommendations some of the best practices during the design process and some of the key things to look for.