About the Reviewer

Francesco Sapio obtained his Computer Science and Control Engineering degree from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, with a couple of semesters in advance, graduating summa cum laude. He is currently studying a Master of Science in Engineering in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the same university.

He is a Unity 3D and Unreal expert, a skilled game designer, and an experienced user of the major graphics programs. He developed Gea 2: A New Earth (Sapienza University of Rome), an educational game for high school students to learn concepts of physics, and Sticker Book (series) (Dataware Games), a cross-platform series of games for kids. In addition, he worked as consultant for the (successfully funded by Kickstarter) game Prosperity – Italy 1434 (Entertainment Game Apps, Inc), and for the open online collaborative ideation system titled Innovoice (Sapienza University of Rome). Moreover, he has been involved in different research projects, such as Belief-Driven-Pathfinding (Sapienza University of Rome), a new technique of pathfinding in videogames that was presented as a paper at the DiGRA-FDG Conference 2016; and Project Anima (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), which included developing a recommendation system for games.

He has authored several books for Packt. He is an active writer on the topic of game development. Recently, he authored the book Getting Started with Unity 5.x 2D Game Development, which takes your hand and guides you through the amazing journey of game development, the successful Unity UI Cookbook, which has been translated into other languages, and teaches readers how to develop exciting and practical user interfaces for games within Unity, and a short e-guide called What do you need to know about Unity. In addition, he co-authored the book Unity 5.x 2D Game Development Blueprints. Furthermore, he has also been a reviewer for the following books: Game Development Patterns and Best Practices, Game Physics Cookbook, Mastering Unity 5.x, Unity 5.x by Example, and Unity Game Development Scripting.

Francesco is also a musician and a composer, especially of soundtracks for short films and video games. For several years, he worked as an actor and dancer, where he was a guest of honor at the theatre Brancaccio in Rome. In addition, he is a very active person, having volunteered as a children’s entertainer at the Associazione Culturale Torraccia in Rome.

Finally, Francesco loves math, philosophy, logic, and puzzle solving, but most of all, creating video games — thanks to his passion for game designing and programming.

You can find him at www.francescosapio.com.