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

Understanding the pathfinder

The pathfinder is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm that has the objective of finding the best path between two points in a 2D or 3D world. The algorithm has a graph data structure that uses a set of nodes, and their adjacent connected nodes, to search for the best path.

The pathfinder is commonly used in RTS games, so the selected units and even the enemies can find the best path while avoiding blocks in the way. We are going to get an overview of the pathfinder algorithm and understand how it works.

The Greedy Best-First and A* algorithms

Game worlds can be represented, for example, as a grid of squares or hexes, with every cell being a node. The cell neighbors are the adjacent nodes used to determine the path. In the following figure, we can see the best path that the pathfinder can find from the blue cell to the orange cell, which is just a straight line:

Figure 8.1 – Pathfinding in a direct line

Figure 8.1 – Pathfinding in a direct line

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