Books by Simon Jackson

Ever since my early years I have been a tinkerer, engineer, problem solver, and solution gatherer. In short, I love to break things apart, figure out how they work, and then put them back together, usually better than before. I started way back when with my first computer, the Commodore Vic20. It was simple, used a tape deck, and forced you to write programs in basic or assembly; they were fun times. From there, I progressed through the ZX Spectrum +2 and the joyous days of modern graphics, but with the 30 minute load times from a trusty tape deck. Games were a passion of mine even then, which led to many requests for another gaming machine, but Santa brought me an Amstrad 1640, my first PC. From there, my tinkering and building exploded, and that machine ended up being a huge monstrosity with so many addons, tweaks, and fixes; I was Frankenstein, and this PC became my own personal monster crafted from so many parts. Good times. This passion has led me down many paths, and I learned to help educate others on the tips and tricks I learned along the way; these skills have equipped me well for the future. Today I would class myself as a game development generalist. I work with many different frameworks, each time digging down, ripping them apart, and then showing whoever would listen through my blog, videos, and speaking events how to build awesome frameworks and titles. This has been throughout many generations of C++, MDX, XNA (what a breath of fresh air that was), MonoGame, Unity 3D, The Sunburn Gaming Engine, HTML, and a bunch of other proprietary frameworks; I do them all. This gives a very balanced view of how to build and manage many different types of multiplatform titles. I don't stop there, as I regularly contribute to the MonoGame project, adding new features and new samples before publishing it on NuGet. I also have several of my own open source projects and actively seek out any new and interesting ones to help with. By day I am a lowly lead technical architect working in the healthcare software industry seeking to improve patients' health and care through better software (a challenge to be sure), but by night I truly soar! Building, tinkering, and educating whilst trying to push game titles of my own. One day they will pay the bills, but until then I still lead a double life. More recently, I achieved the highly acclaimed reward of being a Microsoft MVP in the ID@Xbox program, for my evangelizing efforts in the game development space. This won't change much about me, but will give me additional tools to help game developers out there. Lastly, you should check out my previous title, which has been one of Packt's best sellers since its release, especially if you want to learn more about Unity's 2D system. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/MasteringUnity2DGameDevelopment.