Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game engines are central to the video games we know and love. From the artwork to the mathematics that underpin the frames onscreen, the engine calls the shots. Aside from offering one of the leading 3D game engines, Unity also provides a superlative development tool ñ a tool that can produce professional standard games for Mac, PC, and the Unity Web Player. This book is a complete exercise in game development covering environments, physics, sound, particles, and much more, to get you up and working with Unity quickly. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of developing 3D games before getting to grips with development in Unity itself. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating simple game elements you will learn everything you'll need to get started with game development for the PC, Mac, and Web. This book is designed to cover a set of easy to follow examples, which culminate in the production of a First Person 3D game, complete with an interactive island environment. By introducing common concepts of game and 3D production, you'll explore Unity to make a character interact with the game world, and build puzzles for the player to solve, in order to complete the game. At the end of the book, you will have a fully working 3D game and all the skills required to extend the game further, giving your end-user, the player, the best experience possible. Soon you will be creating your own 3D games with ease!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. Menu Design

In order to create a rounded example game, in this chapter, we will look at creating a separate scene to our existing island scene to act as a menu. Menu design in Unity can be achieved in a number of ways using a combination of built-in behaviors and 2D texture rendering.

Game titles you introduce should be added using GUI Textures, such as a splash screen with developer logos or loading screen. However, when adding interactive menus, you need to consider two different approaches, one using GUI Textures — an area we've already explored when implementing our Matches GUI in the previous chapter and the crosshair in Chapter 6, and the other utilizing UnityGUI classes, incorporating GUI skin assets.

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

  • Creation of two different approaches to interface design

  • Control of GUI Texture components with scripted mouse events

  • Writing a basic UnityGUI script

  • Settings for GUI skin assets

  • Loading scenes to navigate menus and loading the game...