Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game engines are central to the video games we know and love. From the artwork to the mathematics that underpin the frames onscreen, the engine calls the shots. Aside from offering one of the leading 3D game engines, Unity also provides a superlative development tool ñ a tool that can produce professional standard games for Mac, PC, and the Unity Web Player. This book is a complete exercise in game development covering environments, physics, sound, particles, and much more, to get you up and working with Unity quickly. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of developing 3D games before getting to grips with development in Unity itself. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating simple game elements you will learn everything you'll need to get started with game development for the PC, Mac, and Web. This book is designed to cover a set of easy to follow examples, which culminate in the production of a First Person 3D game, complete with an interactive island environment. By introducing common concepts of game and 3D production, you'll explore Unity to make a character interact with the game world, and build puzzles for the player to solve, in order to complete the game. At the end of the book, you will have a fully working 3D game and all the skills required to extend the game further, giving your end-user, the player, the best experience possible. Soon you will be creating your own 3D games with ease!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Scripting basics


Scripting is one of the most crucial elements in becoming a games developer. While Unity is fantastic at allowing you to create games with minimal knowledge of game engine source code, you will still need to understand how to write code that commands the Unity engine. Code written for use with Unity draws upon a series of ready-built classes, which you should think of as libraries of instructions or behaviors. By writing scripts, you will create your own classes by drawing upon commands in the existing Unity engine.

In this book, we will primarily focus on writing scripts in Unity's JavaScript, as it is the easiest language to get started with and is the main focus of Unity's scripting reference documentation. While this book will introduce you to the basics of scripting, it is highly recommended that you read the Unity Scripting Reference in parallel to it, and this is available as part of your Unity installation, and also online at:

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation...