Greetings and welcome to Mastering Unity 5.x! This book teaches Unity initially from a beginner's perspective, and then helps you develop that knowledge in a particular way. Specifically, it develops a general, overarching mastery, in which you’ll learn Unity like a seasoned indie developer' capable of turning your hand to pretty much any department and feature set within Unity. The following chapter outline explains, in detail, the full range of features that we’ll explore. However, the central aim of this book is to make you versatile and fully competent with Unity, capable of encountering a problem and solving it in the language of Unity’s feature set. In this book, we’ll concentrate, for the most part, on a practical example; we’ll build a first-person combat game across multiple chapters, which will test your typing skills in more ways than one. So, let’s go!
Chapter 1, Preparation and Asset-Configuring, outlines the project we’ll be focusing on in the book. It specifies tips and tricks to import assets optimally, configure assets, and best-practice workflows to keep your project organized.
Chapter 2, Level Design and Structure, gets you started with designing and building the main game level inside Unity, exploring interesting level design ideas as well as critically important practical considerations.
Chapter 3, Player Controls – Movement, explores player controls, that is, how player input drives and controls the main game camera.
Chapter 4, Player Controls – Typing and Health, focuses on creating a combat mechanic that damages enemies; every character that can be damaged needs health, representing the total amount of damage a character may sustain.
Chapter 5, Enemies and Artificial Intelligence, looks at how to achieve intelligent and believable enemy behavior using AI. By using AI, enemies will move around the level seeking the player and will attack when in range.
Chapter 6, Project Management and Version Control, looks at ways to optimize the game development workflow by using Version Control software. This keeps a record of your project as it moves through all its iterations.
Chapter 7, Persistent Data – Load and Save Game States, focuses on the different saving methods available with Unity as players often want their in-game progress saved, allowing them to resume where they left off previously every time they start a new play session.
Chapter 8, Performance, Optimization, Mobiles, and More, explores a selection of related topics. Specifically, it will explore how to improve the performance of your games through optimization, how to prepare your games for mobile deployment, and how to prepare generally for VR development.
To read this book effectively, and to complete the tasks within it, you need only two things: first, the Unity 5 software (which you can get for free from https://unity3d.com) and second, the determination to succeed! Using only these tools, you can learn to produce great games in Unity.
If you are a Unity developer who now wants to develop and deploy interesting games by leveraging the new features of Unity 5.x, then this is the book for you. A basic knowledge of C# programming is assumed.
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: "This should be dragged and dropped into the music folder."
A block of code is set as follows:
//Collection of combat sounds public AudioClip[] CombatSounds;
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: "From the Command Palette, choose Change Case Lower."
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