About the Reviewer

Francesco Sapio received his Master of Science in Engineering in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics degree from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, a couple of semesters in advance, graduating summa cum laude; he is currently a PhD researcher at the same university.

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

Francesco is an active writer on the topic of game development. Recently, Recently, he authored the book Getting Started with Unity 5.x 2D Game Development (Packt Publishing) that takes your hand and guide you through the amazing journey of game development, the successful Unity UI Cookbook (Packt Publishing), which has been translated also in other languages, that teaches readers how to develop exciting and practical user interfaces for games within Unity, and a short e-guide What do you need to know about Unity (Packt Publishing). In addition, he co-authored the book Unity 5.x 2D Game Development Blueprints (Packt Publishing), and the video course Unity 5.x Game Development Projects (Packt Publishing). Furthermore, he has also been a reviewer for the following books: Game Audio Development with Unity 5.x (Packt Publishing), Game Development Patterns and Best Practices (Packt Publishing), Game Physics Cookbook (Packt Publishing), Mastering Unity 5.x (Packt Publishing), Unity 5.x by Example (Packt Publishing), and Unity Game Development Scripting (Packt Publishing); as well as for the following video courses: Building an FPS Game with Unity and UFPS (Packt Publishing), Enhancement with Unity UI Advanced (Packt Publishing), and Making Sense of Data with Java (Packt Publishing).

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 Teatro Brancaccio in Rome. In addition, he has 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.

I'm deeply thankful to my parents for their infinite patience, enthusiasm and support throughout my life. Moreover, I'm thankful to the rest of my family, in particular to my grandparents, since they have always encouraged me to do better in my life with the Latin expressions "Ad maiora" and "Per aspera ad astra".