About the Authors

ALEXANDRE SANTOS LOBÃO is a passionate man. His first passion was reading, starting with large books—Mark Twain, Érico Veríssimo, Jules Verne, Monteiro Lobato, Alexandre Dumas, and others—when he was 7 years old. When he was 12, he discovered his next two passions: playing and creating games (by that time on his first Apple computer), and writing.

Many years later, these passions flourish. Now he is a teacher of academic game development courses, has written four books on the topic, and has participated in some Brazilian game development contests, both as a contestant and as a judge. He has also written short-story books, children's books, and young adult books. In 2008, he released his first romance, The Name of the Eagle. And, of course, he still loves to read, from Ken Follett to Paulo Coelho.

His ultimate passions—starting in 1995 and still burning now—are his wife, Waléria, and his kids, Natália and Rafael.

Alexandre believes that lives need passion to be lived entirely, and hopes that this book helps light this passion in readers' hearts. You can find his work at http://www.AlexandreLobao.com.

BRUNO EVANGELISTA is a game developer with a passion for computer graphics. Bruno started programming when he was 10 years old—his father taught him how to write programs in BASIC—and he always dreamed of creating games instead of just playing them.

Bruno was a graphics programmer at VirsaT, which developed the Peixis game, winner of the JogosBR 2006 (the Brazilian national contest of complete games), and he was also a software engineer at Olympya. He has also worked on projects and game demos developed with C++, C#, and Java using DirectX, OpenGL, and XNA.

Besides his professional experience, Bruno has hosted courses and tutorials about shader development, XNA, and OpenGL at conferences and universities, such as the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing (SIBGRAPI), Brazilian Symposia on Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames), Gamefest Brazil, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC-MG), and Veiga Almeida University, Rio de Janeiro (UVA-RJ).

As an avid XNA developer, Bruno has taken second and third place, respectively, in the 2006 and 2007 XNA Challenge Brazil competitions.

Bruno received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from PUC-MG in 2006 and is currently a Master of Science candidate in Computer Science at UFMG. He lives in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. You can find his work at http://www.BrunoEvangelista.com.

JOSÉ ANTONIO LEAL DE FARIAS has been a game programmer since he acquired his first computer in 1985, when he tried to draw aliens on an 80-by-25 pixel screen. After obtaining a degree in computer science, he established one of the first game companies in Brazil in 1997, called Hardcode Entertainment. He has worked on many diverse gaming projects in Europe and the United States. In 2004, he received the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award from Microsoft for his contributions to the Brazilian coding community. In 2006, he established the Sharp Games community, devoted to studying and spreading advice about the XNA platform. You can find the portal for Sharp Games at http://www.sharpgames.net.

RIEMER GROOTJANS received a degree in electronic engineering with a specialization in informatics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium. He is currently working as a member of a research team toward a PhD degree. The goal of the team is to develop a real-time 3D depthsensing camera, and he is responsible for (among other things) the visualization of the 3D data.

For several years, Riemer has been maintaining a web site with tutorials for DirectX. Since the launch of XNA in December 2006, he has ported all his content to XNA and is helping more than 2,000 people on their path to XNA success every day. In July 2007 and 2008, he received the Microsoft MVP Award for his contributions to the XNA community.