Chapter 1, Interactive Input, gives an in-depth look at how to create controls for both the Xbox 360 Controller and mouse/keyboard inputs. Along with creating those inputs, you'll also create customizable control profiles that the player can use to play your game the way they want to.

Chapter 2, GUI Time, will help you create both 2D and 3D GUI elements. This covers health bars, player data, hovering 3D health bars, 3D damage reports, enemy names, and so on.

Chapter 3, Expandable Item Classes, will teach you how to create in-game item classes for self, melee, and projectile items. Then, you'll create a classification system for these items to determine what they do.

Chapter 4, Inventory, will teach you a way to create an inventory system for your game. In this system, there'll be common inventory elements created such as adding items, removing items, and creating quick-select items. Finally, you'll also create a way to show the inventory on the GUI.

Chapter 5, Enemy and Friendly AIs, will demonstrate how to create a dynamic AI. It will cover what a finite state machine is and also what a behavior tree is. This AI system will handle behaviors, actions, animations, pathfinding, and also a waypoint system.

Chapter 6, Keeping Score, covers how to create, track, and save stats for the player. You'll also create a system for achievements for those stats as well.

Chapter 7, Creating Save and Load Systems, covers how to create systems to save and load from a flat file as well as an XML file. Then, you'll take these systems and implement them on a checkpoint-based save system and an anywhere/anytime saving system.

Chapter 8, Aural Integration, covers the creation of systems that will handle background music, atmospheric sounds, and sound effects. These systems are a playlist system, a randomized system, and an event-driven system.

Chapter 9, Game Settings, covers how to create customizable configurations for audio and video settings. You'll create the ability to save and load these settings by using PlayerPrefs.

Chapter 10, Putting It All Together, will put almost everything you've learned from the previous chapters into a small game. By taking elements from the previous chapters, you'll create a short First Person Action RPG.

For this book, all that you'll need is Unity3D to write all of the scripts needed and Notepad++ to create XML files. While you may be able to create XML files in other programs, I use Notepad++ because it's easy to use and is a nice program to have as a programmer.

This book can be used by someone who already has some programming or scripting knowledge and wants to get into game development using Unity3D. If you've already been using Unity3D for some time, this book may be of use to you as well as it has a theme to create modular gameplay elements.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The reset function will use our SetDefaultValues() function as well as reset a couple of our other variables."

A block of code is set as follows:

void Reset()
{
  SetDefaultValues();
  ShowPopup = false;
  PreviousKey = KeyCode.None;
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Open up the Axes dropdown by clicking on the arrow next to it."

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