What this book covers
Chapter 1, Designing a Game from Scratch, is where we will discuss the details of the game we are going to create in the book before even opening Unity for the first time.
Chapter 2, Setting Up Unity, is where you will learn how to install and set up Unity on your computer, and is also where you will create your first project.
Chapter 3, Working with Scenes and GameObjects, is where we will learn about the concepts of Scenes and GameObjects, which are part of Unity's way of describing what your game world is composed of.
Chapter 4, Grayboxing with Terrain and ProBuilder, is where we will be creating our first level layout and prototyping it with the Terrain and ProBuilder Unity features.
Chapter 5, Importing and Integrating Assets, introduces graphics. As Unity is not a tool for creating graphics, but for displaying them, we will learn how to improve our Scene art by importing graphics into Unity.
Chapter 6, Materials and Effects with URP and Shader Graph, is where we will see how to use one of the latest Unity Render Systems (Universal Render Pipeline) and how to create effects with the Shader Graph feature.
Chapter 7, Visual Effects with Particle Systems and VFX Graph, is where you will learn how to create visual effects, for things such as water and fire, using the two main Unity tools for doing so: Particle Systems and the VFX Graph.
Chapter 8, Lighting Using the Universal Render Pipeline, covers lighting. Lighting is a concept big enough to have its own chapter. Here we will deepen our knowledge of the Universal Render Pipeline, specifically looking at its lighting capabilities.
Chapter 9, Fullscreen Effects with Post-Processing, delves into effects and post-processing. To get that cinematic effect that most modern games have today, we will learn how to add a layer of effects on top of our Scene graphics using the post-processing feature of the Universal Render Pipeline.
Chapter 10, Sound and Music Integration, gets into an often-neglected area: sound. Being underestimated by most beginner developers, here we will learn how to properly add sound and music to our game, taking into consideration its impact on performance.
Chapter 11, User Interface Design, explores the use of the user interface (UI). Of all the graphic-based ways to communicate information to the user, the use of the UI is the most direct. We will learn how to display information in the form of text, images, and life bars using the Unity UI system.
Chapter 12, Creating Animations with Animator, Cinemachine, and Timeline, moves us on from our simple static Scene. In this chapter, we will start moving our characters with animations and creating cutscenes with the latest Unity features for doing so.
Chapter 13, Introduction to Unity Scripting with C#, is the first programming chapter of the book. We will learn how to create our first script using C# in the Unity way.
Chapter 14, Implementing Movement and Spawning, is where we will learn how to program the movement of our objects and how to spawn them. General programming knowledge is assumed from now on.
Chapter 15, Physics Collisions and Health System, is where you will learn how to configure the physics settings of objects to detect when two of them collide and react to the collision. To put this in practice, we'll be creating a health system.
Chapter 16, Win and Lose Conditions, is where we will be detecting when the game should end, which will be when the player either wins it or loses it.
Chapter 17, Scripting the UI, Sounds, and Graphics, is where we will be making the previously created UI to show the relevant and current information of the game, such as the player's health and the score. Also, we'll look at sounds being played when necessary and the use of visual effects to reflect the actions of the player.
Chapter 18, Implementing Game AI to Build Enemies, is where we will be creating basic AI using several Unity features to create challenging enemies in our game.
Chapter 19, Scene Performance Optimization, explores performance. Making our game perform well is no easy task, and it is certainly a requirement if we want to release it. Here we will be learning how to profile our game's performance and tackle the most common performance issues.
Chapter 20, Building the Project, is where we will learn how to convert our Unity project into an executable format to distribute it to other people and run it without Unity being installed.
Chapter 21, Finishing Touches, is where we will briefly discuss how to move forward with the development of our game after finishing this book, discussing topics such as how to iterate and release the game.
Chapter 22, Augmented Reality in Unity, gives you an introduction to augmented reality (AR). In this extra chapter, we will be learning how to create an AR application with Unity's AR Foundation package, one of the most recently released ways to create AR applications with Unity.