What this book covers

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).