Book Image

Creating an RTS Game in Unity 2023

By : Bruno Cicanci
4.5 (2)
Book Image

Creating an RTS Game in Unity 2023

4.5 (2)
By: Bruno Cicanci

Overview of this book

Building a successful real-time strategy game is challenging, because of both the complex mechanics and the need to strike a balance between different elements, ensuring that players enjoy creating and executing strategies against the game's AI. Creating an RTS Game in Unity 2023 will teach you how to install and set up the Unity game engine, create a new 3D project, and build a level editor to make it easier to modify and add maps to a game. The RTS game will start to take shape while you learn to implement different core systems such as melee and ranged battles, unit spawners, camera controls, dynamic mapping generation, basic enemy AI, and the pathfinder algorithm. You'll also get to grips with implementing command units to perform actions, crafting and producing resources, basic physics and collision detection, and building an RTS game from scratch using C# and the latest features of the Unity game engine. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to make professional and high-quality end-to-end RTS games using the best practices and techniques from the gaming industry.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundations of RTS Games
6
Part 2: The Combat Units
11
Part 3: The Battlefield
15
Part 4: The Gameplay

Implementing the Pathfinder

One of the coolest features of an RTS game is that the selected units always find the best path to reach their destination, avoiding rocks, trees, buildings, and everything else on their way. There is an AI algorithm behind this feature, called a pathfinder, and it has a few different implementations. In this chapter, we will take a look at the most used algorithms and will focus on the Navigation Mesh (NavMesh).

We will implement the NavMesh on Unity by using the AI Navigation package, setting up our units as agents and the level items as obstacles, and letting the NavMesh find the best path and move the selected units to the destination, avoiding or moving around the obstacles. We are also going to learn how to use the visual debugging tool from the AI Navigation package to see in real time how the NavMesh finds the best path for the agents.

By the end of this chapter, you will learn what a pathfinder algorithm is and the difference between the most...