Flappy Bird - available previously on Andoid and iOS operating systems. The highly controversial game is just now catching on after almost a year after its initial release and demand for ways to get better at it haven't been higher. This guide will hopefully teach and help you succeed at getting your Flappy Bird through many pipes within the structured level. Note: This is a guide and not the game. The game is a free app and can be found in various places on the internet. It is not available anymore on any store.
How we talk about games as real or not-real, and how that shapes what games are made and who is invited to play them. In videogame criticism, the worst insult might be “That's not a real game!” For example, “That's not a real game, it's on Facebook!” and “That's not a real game, it's a walking simulator!” But how do people judge what is a real game and what is not—what features establish a game's gameness? In this engaging book, Mia Consalvo and Christopher Paul examine the debates about the realness or not-realness of videogames and find that these discussions shape what games get made and who is invited to play them. Consalvo and Paul look at three main areas often viewed as determining a game's legitimacy: the game's pedigree (its developer), the content of the game itself, and the game's payment structure. They find, among other things, that even developers with a track record are viewed with suspicion if their games are on suspect platforms. They investigate game elements that are potentially troublesome for a game's gameness, including genres, visual aesthetics, platform, and perceived difficulty. And they explore payment models, particularly free-to-play—held by some to be a marker of illegitimacy. Finally, they examine the debate around such so-called walking simulators as Dear Esther and Gone Home. And finally, they consider what purpose is served by labeling certain games “real."
"App Quality: Secrets for Agile App Teams" gives agile and lean app teams an edge in building well-received apps, and accelerates them on the way to 5-stars. The book is written for app developers, testers and product managers. The book uses real world examples and data-driven techniques that any app team can apply to their designs, code, agile sprints, and product planning. "App Quality" gives your app team access to the best practices and hard-earned lessons from analyzing hundreds of millions of app store reviews, thousands of app testers testing hundreds of top apps, and conversations with top app teams. Included: Top 10 App Quality Monsters Top 10 Quality Attributes Tips for Developers, Testers, and Product Managers The book is aimed at both "Agile" and "Lean" app teams. The book is focused on analytics and practical, real-world examples of quality issues, and practical solutions to those quality issues. Whether the team is just starting to plan their next great app, or improving an existing one, following the recommendations and system outlined in this book will help get your app to 5 stars. "App Quality" walks through the "Top 10 App Quality Monsters". These are the top sources of quality issues in today's modern apps: App Deployment and Distribution, Device State and Fragmentation, Users, Real World, Reviews, Metrics, Competition, Security and Privacy, User Interface, and Agile Mobile Teams themselves. Each quality monster is described in detail, with specific best practices and tips for Developers, Testers, and Product Managers. The book also describes the "Top 10 Quality Attributes", learned from app store review analysis and app testing: Content, Elegance, Interoperability, Performance, Pricing, Privacy, Satisfaction, Security, Stability, and Usability. Each quality attribute is described in detail, with real world app examples, with specific best practices and tips Developers, Testers, and Product Managers and pointers to tools and services to improve app quality. Prepare for a deep dive on app store reviews. Deep analytics of what types of feedback people are leaving in the apps store reviews, by type, by frequency, per-category, etc. The book outlines ways to leverage this data to build a higher quality app, improve star ratings, and make users happier. Some myths about Agile for app teams are also debunked. Techniques for leveraging app store reviews for competitive analysis are also described in detail. App store reviews are critical to building a high quality app that is also perceived as high quality. Putting it all together, the book then walks through an example of applying all these great tips, best practices, and data, to a real-world app. See how an expert applies these techniques to a real world app, and see how it can easily apply to your app. See the impact on test planning, development practices, and product prioritization. Armed with the latest best practices, tips, and data-driven quality analysis, app teams can build solid apps with minimal effort and time. The secrets in "App Quality" gives agile and lean teams an edge in building well-received apps, and accelerate them on the way to 5-stars.
The book covers numerous tech entrepreneurial founders and software developers, and the exciting brands or products that they created. It goes deep on a handful of them, narrowly divulging exactly how a few software developers and startup founders created breakthrough tech products like Gmail, Dropbox, Ring, Snapchat, Bitcoin, Groupon, and more. It highlights and unpacks the general hero-worship that the media and our own minds practice about tech founders and tech entrepreneurs. This idealization of tech success can create a paradox, preventing average tech professionals from their own successful journeys. This book provides hard evidence that anyone in tech can create, and anyone on the peripheral of tech can break through to the center where innovation, creativity, and opportunity meet. The anecdotes, stories, evidence, facts, arguments, logic, principles, and techniques provided in this book have helped individuals and businesses engage in slow creation cycles, improve the morale of their development teams, and increased their delivery potential of their technology solutions overall. Average Joe covers: Genius - The systematic deconstruction and debunking of the commonly held assumptions in the tech industry around supreme intelligence, and how that intelligence has been worshipped and sought after, despite the facts. Slow Creation - How to force-manufacture creative ideation. How conscious and subconscious cycles of patterns, details, and secrets can lead to breakthrough innovations, and how those P.D.S. cycles, and systematic mental grappling, can be conjured and repeated on a regular basis. Little-C Creativity - The conscious and miniature moments of epiphany that leak into our active P.D.S. cycles of Slow Creation. Flow - Why it's great, but also - why it's completely unreliable and unnecessary. How to perpetually innovate without relying on a flow state. Team Installation - How teams and companies can engage their employees in Slow Creation to unlock dormant ideas, stir up creative endeavors, and jumpstart fragile ideas into working products. User Manipulation - How tech products are super-charged with tricks, secret techniques, and neural transmitters like Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Cortisol; how those products leverage cognitive mechanisms and psychological techniques to force user adoption and user behaviors. Contrarianism - How oppositional and backward-thinking leaders create brand-new categories and the products which dominate those categories. Showmanship - How tech players have presented their ideas to the world, conjured up magic, manufactured mystique, and presented compelling stories that have captured their audiences. Sustainable Mystique Triad – A simple model for capturing audiences consistently without relying on hype and hustle.
This book constitutes selected, revised and extended papers from the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, CSEDU 2020, held as a virtual event in May 2020. The 25 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 190 submissions. The presented papers contribute to the understanding of relevant trends of current research on Computer Supported Education, including learning analytics, intelligent tutoring systems, virtual and augmented reality, MOOCs, and automated assessment systems.
How making and sharing video games offer educational benefits for coding, collaboration, and creativity. Over the last decade, video games designed to teach academic content have multiplied. Students can learn about Newtonian physics from a game or prep for entry into the army. An emphasis on the instructionist approach to gaming, however, has overshadowed the constructionist approach, in which students learn by designing their own games themselves. In this book, Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke discuss the educational benefits of constructionist gaming—coding, collaboration, and creativity—and the move from “computational thinking” toward “computational participation.” Kafai and Burke point to recent developments that support a shift to game making from game playing, including the game industry's acceptance, and even promotion, of “modding” and the growth of a DIY culture. Kafai and Burke show that student-designed games teach not only such technical skills as programming but also academic subjects. Making games also teaches collaboration, as students frequently work in teams to produce content and then share their games with in class or with others online. Yet Kafai and Burke don't advocate abandoning instructionist for constructionist approaches. Rather, they argue for a more comprehensive, inclusive idea of connected gaming in which both making and gaming play a part.
Develop self-learning algorithms and agents using TensorFlow and other Python tools, frameworks, and libraries Key FeaturesLearn, develop, and deploy advanced reinforcement learning algorithms to solve a variety of tasksUnderstand and develop model-free and model-based algorithms for building self-learning agentsWork with advanced Reinforcement Learning concepts and algorithms such as imitation learning and evolution strategiesBook Description Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular and promising branch of AI that involves making smarter models and agents that can automatically determine ideal behavior based on changing requirements. This book will help you master RL algorithms and understand their implementation as you build self-learning agents. Starting with an introduction to the tools, libraries, and setup needed to work in the RL environment, this book covers the building blocks of RL and delves into value-based methods, such as the application of Q-learning and SARSA algorithms. You'll learn how to use a combination of Q-learning and neural networks to solve complex problems. Furthermore, you'll study the policy gradient methods, TRPO, and PPO, to improve performance and stability, before moving on to the DDPG and TD3 deterministic algorithms. This book also covers how imitation learning techniques work and how Dagger can teach an agent to drive. You'll discover evolutionary strategies and black-box optimization techniques, and see how they can improve RL algorithms. Finally, you'll get to grips with exploration approaches, such as UCB and UCB1, and develop a meta-algorithm called ESBAS. By the end of the book, you'll have worked with key RL algorithms to overcome challenges in real-world applications, and be part of the RL research community. What you will learnDevelop an agent to play CartPole using the OpenAI Gym interfaceDiscover the model-based reinforcement learning paradigmSolve the Frozen Lake problem with dynamic programmingExplore Q-learning and SARSA with a view to playing a taxi gameApply Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) to Atari games using GymStudy policy gradient algorithms, including Actor-Critic and REINFORCEUnderstand and apply PPO and TRPO in continuous locomotion environmentsGet to grips with evolution strategies for solving the lunar lander problemWho this book is for If you are an AI researcher, deep learning user, or anyone who wants to learn reinforcement learning from scratch, this book is for you. You’ll also find this reinforcement learning book useful if you want to learn about the advancements in the field. Working knowledge of Python is necessary.
This book is intended for programmers who are comfortable with the Python language and who want to build desktop and mobile applications with rich GUI in Python with minimal hassle. Knowledge of Kivy is not strictly required—every aspect of the framework is described when it's first used.
Making a game can be an intensive process, and if not planned accurately can easily run over budget. The use of procedural generation in game design can help with the intricate and multifarious aspects of game development; thus facilitating cost reduction. This form of development enables games to create their play areas, objects and stories based on a set of rules, rather than relying on the developer to handcraft each element individually. Readers will learn to create randomized maps, weave accidental plotlines, and manage complex systems that are prone to unpredictable behavior. Tanya Short’s and Tarn Adams’ Procedural Generation in Game Design offers a wide collection of chapters from various experts that cover the implementation and enactment of procedural generation in games. Designers from a variety of studios provide concrete examples from their games to illustrate the many facets of this emerging sub-discipline. Key Features: Introduces the differences between static/traditional game design and procedural game design Demonstrates how to solve or avoid common problems with procedural game design in a variety of concrete ways Includes industry leaders’ experiences and lessons from award-winning games World’s finest guide for how to begin thinking about procedural design
CODERS ARE ROCK STARS Coders are the people who are building the future. You can stake your own claim on the future by learning pro coding techniques. Take a look inside to figure out how and why coders think a bit differently, the basics of building a working application with a professional coding language, and how to test your app to make sure it works. Get a jump on your future as a rock-star coder today! See the big picture – get a grip on how pro coders start and finish a project Know the code – get your hands on a pro coding language and put it to work Make things happen – create a working application you can share with friends
