Chapter 1, A Flat World in Unity, is an introduction to the 2D world of Unity. You will discover how to set up your project, import assets, and make them ready to use. In particular, we will go through in detail on how to use the Sprite Editor.

Chapter 2, Baking Cupcake Towers, teaches you how to integrate code within your game. We will cover the important and fundamental concepts of Unity and we will see how to script game objects by starting to create the behaviors of our cupcake towers for the tower defense game we are building.

Chapter 3, Communicating with the Player – the User Interface, deals with the important task to provide feedback to your players through the use of user interfaces (UIs). You will learn how to design them by discovering the general principles behind them, and learn how to implement any UI within the UI system of Unity.

Chapter 4, No Longer Alone – Sweet-Toothed Pandas Strike, introduces us to the terrible sweet-toothed Pandas, who will try to steal the player's cake. You will learn how to bring characters to life by using the powerful animation system of Unity Mechanim, starting from Sprite-sheets.

Chapter 5, The Secret Ingredient Is a Dash of Physics, takes you by hand deep down into the secrets of physics and explains them in a clear and easy way. You will grasp the basics of physics, and learn how to use the 2D Physics engine of Unity.

Chapter 6, Through a Sea of Sprinkles – Navigation in Artificial Intelligence, is an introduction to the universe of artificial intelligence applied to video games. You will learn the basics principles and how to implement a navigation system in Unity for 2D (or even 3D) games, so that we can make our terrible sweet-toothed Pandas move!

Chapter 7, Trading Cupcakes and the Ultimate Battle for the Cake – Gameplay Programming, wraps everything we saw and learned in the previous chapters to conclude the tower defense game. In particular, we will deal with gameplay programming, which is the glue between the different parts of your game.

Chapter 8, What Is beyond the Cake?, explores different aspects of our game and game development in general. You will discover different tips, tricks, and suggestions on how to improve the game we built in this book, along with improving your own skills to become a better game developer. Then, the chapter will give you an understanding of parts of the game development pipeline, which are not strictly tied to the development of the game itself. Thus, you will dive into different topics ranging from playtesting, optimizations, team management and work, documentation, getting ready to publish your game, marketing, social media, game protections, to even localization.

To go through the topics covered in this book, you will need two important things:

Anyone including students, game enthusiasts, and academic professors who want to adopt this book as part of their course and classes. 

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: "All of them are placed inside a folder named Assets, which can be found inside the Project folder."

A block of code is set as follows:

public AwesomeUnityDeveloper GettingStarted(Yourself you) {
  you.ReadThisBook();
  return you;
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

public AwesomeUnityDeveloper GettingStarted(Yourself you) {
  you.ReadThisBook();
  return you;
}

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: "First of all, if you ever need to switch between 2D and 3D mode, you can do so by navigating to Edit | Project Settings | Editor."

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