Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2020 - Fifth Edition

By : Harrison Ferrone
Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2020 - Fifth Edition

By: Harrison Ferrone

Overview of this book

Over the years, the Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity series has established itself as a popular choice for getting up to speed with C#, a powerful and versatile programming language that can be applied in a wide array of application areas. This book presents a clear path for learning C# programming from the ground up without complex jargon or unclear programming logic, all while building a simple game with Unity. This fifth edition has been updated to introduce modern C# features with the latest version of the Unity game engine, and a new chapter has been added on intermediate collection types. Starting with the basics of software programming and the C# language, you’ll learn the core concepts of programming in C#, including variables, classes, and object-oriented programming. Once you’ve got to grips with C# programming, you’ll enter the world of Unity game development and discover how you can create C# scripts for simple game mechanics. Throughout the book, you’ll gain hands-on experience with programming best practices to help you take your Unity and C# skills to the next level. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to leverage the C# language to build your own real-world Unity game development projects.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

The get and set properties

We've got our manager script and private variables set up, but how do we access them from other classes if they're private? While we could write separate public methods in GameBehavior to handle passing new values to the private variables, let's see whether there is a better way of doing things.

In this case, C# provides all variables with get and set properties, which are perfectly suited to our task. Think of these as methods that are automatically fired by the C# compiler whether we explicitly call them or not, similar to how Start() and Update() are executed by Unity when a scene starts. 

get and set properties can be added to any variable, with or without an initial value, as illustrated in the following code snippet: 

public string firstName { get; set; };

OR

public string lastName { get; set; } = "Smith";

However, using them like this doesn't add any additional benefits; for that, you need to include a code block...