This book explores how to use the Unity engine in a hands-on, practical way by looking at concrete examples that result in real-world playable games. Specifically, it focuses on the implementation of four distinct projects divided across eight chapters, two chapters per project. Let's take a look at what these projects are:

Chapter 1, The Coin Collection Game – Part 1, begins our journey into Unity by creating a first-person collection game. This is a great starting point if you're totally new to Unity and are ready to create your first game.

Chapter 2, Project A – the Collection Game Continued, continues from the previous chapter and completes the first project. It assumes that you have completed the first chapter and brings a closure to our project, leading neatly to the next chapter.

Chapter 3, Project B – the Space Shooter, marks the beginning of our second project, focusing on the creation of a space shooter game. Here, we'll create a project in which the player must shoot the oncoming enemies.

Chapter 4, Continuing the Space Shooter, completes the space shooter project, taking the project from its state in the previous chapter and adding final touches to it.

Chapter 5, Project C – a 2D Adventure, enters the world of 2D and UI functionality. Here, we'll explore Unity's wide range of 2D features in making a side-view platformer game that relies on 2D physics.

Chapter 6, Continuing the 2D Adventure, completes the 2D adventure game project that was started in the previous chapter, adding the final touches and linking it together with the overarching game logic. This is a great place to see how multiple parts and facets of a game come together to form a whole.

Chapter 7, Project D – Intelligent Enemies, focuses on artificial intelligence and creating enemies that can patrol, chase, and attack the player's character at relevant times, while cleverly navigating their way around the level.

Chapter 8, Continuing with Intelligent Enemies, brings closure to the AI project started in the previous chapter, as well as to the book content as a whole. Here, we'll see how to use finite-state machines to achieve powerful intelligence functionality that'll help us in a variety of scenarios.

This book contains almost everything you need to follow along. Each chapter considers practical, real-world projects for learning Unity, and includes companion files which can be downloaded and used. The only thing you need, apart from this book and your concentration, is a copy of the latest version of Unity. At the time of writing, this is Unity 5.3.1. This software is available for free as a personal edition, and can be downloaded from the Unity website, here: https://unity3d.com/. In addition to Unity, if you want to create props, character models, and other 3D assets, you'll also need 3D modeling and animation software, such as 3DS Max, Maya, or Blender; you'll also need image editing software, such as Photoshop or GIMP. Blender can be downloaded and used for free here: http://www.blender.org/. And GIMP can be downloaded and used for free here: https://www.gimp.org/.

This book is ideally suited to readers with no prior experience of Unity or game development and who are considering game development as a hobby or a career. You will typically have some basic knowledge of programming or scripting, perhaps in contexts outside game development, in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, ActionScript, Python, or another object-oriented language. In addition, you should have at least some basic idea of core game development concepts; for example, I'll assume you know what a 3D model is, what a texture is, what an audio file is, and what an executable file is. I take these concepts to be foundational. They will be touched upon on this book briefly, but not elaborated on or explained in depth. Here, we'll focus on Unity as software, as a tool for building real-world games. Each chapter reads as an in-depth tutorial, assembling a functioning product that you can expand upon and play.

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 environment created thus far for the coin collection game has been assembled using only the mesh assets included with the native Prototyping package."

A block of code is set as follows:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Coin : MonoBehaviour
{

  // Use this for initialization
  void Start () {}
  
  // Update is called once per frame
  void Update () {}
}

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

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Coin : MonoBehaviour
 {
  // Use this for initialization
  void Start () {
    Debug.Log ("Object Created");
  }
  
  // Update is called once per frame
  void Update () {
  

  }
}

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: "You'll need to create New Project."

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