Chapter 2. Planning Your Game in the Lumberyard

We started the previous chapter with a brief overview of Lumberyard and looked at what its capabilities are. We then contemplated what we could do with Lumberyard and how it fits into the current game engine landscape. In that chapter, we looked at system requirements and compatibility issues, and took a cursory look at how Lumberyard interacts with cloud-based storage and services. In this chapter, we will look at Lumberyard's beta release history and explore how it impacts your development efforts. We will also preview the games sampled throughout this book. Also in this chapter, we will look at the game functionality that we will create in subsequent chapters, look at game design for Lumberyard games, and explore how to plan the development process.

In this chapter, you will:

• Understand the significance of Lumberyard's beta status
• Become familiar with the sample game content used throughout this book
• Understand the importance of game design and game design documents
• Understand how the UI Editor and UI Animation Editor can be used to create stunning user interfaces
• Understand how gameplay can be created in Lumberyard
• Understand how to create immersive game environments in Lumberyard
• Be able to plan your own Lumberyard development process