Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 5.x - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 5.x - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Unity is a cross-platform game engine that is used to develop 2D and 3D video games. Unity 5 is the latest version, released in March 2015, and adds a real-time global illumination to the games, and its powerful new features help to improve a game’s efficiency. This book will get you started with programming behaviors in C# so you can create 2D games in Unity. You will begin by installing Unity and learning about its features, followed by creating a C# script. We will then deal with topics such as unity scripting for you to understand how codes work so you can create and use C# variables and methods. Moving forward, you will find out how to create, store, and retrieve data from collection of objects. You will also develop an understanding of loops and their use, and you’ll perform object-oriented programming. This will help you to turn your idea into a ready-to-code project and set up a Unity project for production. Finally, you will discover how to create the GameManager class to manage the game play loop, generate game levels, and develop a simple UI for the game. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the art of applying C# in Unity.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 5.x Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with C# script files


Until you learn some basic concepts of programming, it's too early to study how scripts work, but you still need to know how to create one.

There are several ways of creating a script file using Unity:

  1. In the menu, navigate to Assets | Create | C# Script.

  2. In the Project tab, navigate to Create | C# Script.

  3. Right-click in the Project tab, and from the pop-up menu, navigate to Create | C# Script.

All of these ways create a .cs file in the Unity Assets folder. From now on, whenever I tell you to create a C# script, use whichever method you prefer.

Lots of files can create a mess

As our Unity project progresses, we will have lots of different types of files in the Project view. It's highly recommended that you keep a clean and simple folder structure in your project.

Let's keep our scripts in the Scripts folder, textures in Textures, and so on so that it looks something like this:

From now on, let's not keep any loose files in the Assets folder.

Why does my Project tab look different?

Unity allows us to customize the user interface. Everyone has their own favorite. I prefer a one-column layout Project tab instead of Unity's default two-column layout. To change this, open the context menu in the top-right corner of the Project tab, as shown in this screenshot:

When working in a team, you will notice that every team member has his/her own layout preference. A level designer may like to use a big Scene tab. An animator will probably use the Animation and Animator tabs. For a programmer like you, all tabs are fairly important. However, the Console tab is the one that you will use a lot while testing your code. I mostly prefer a layout divided into four columns—from left to right, Scene and Console, then Hierarchy, then Project and finally Inspector. It looks like what is shown in the following screenshot:

Note

If you have trouble with moving tabs around, refer to the Customizing Your Workspace chapter in the Unity Manual.

Feel free to change the interface however you want. But try to keep the Console tab visible all the time. We will use it a lot throughout the book. You can also save your custom layouts in the Layout menu.

Note

The Console tab shows messages, warnings, errors, or debug output from your game. You can define your own messages to be sent to the console.