Book Image

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game Engines such as Unity are the power-tools behind the games we know and love. Unity is one of the most widely-used and best loved packages for game development and is used by everyone, from hobbyists to large studios, to create games and interactive experiences for the web, desktop, mobile, and console. With Unity’s intuitive, easy to learn toolset and this book – it’s never been easier to become a game developer. 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 – prototyping a simple scenario, and then creating a larger game. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating game mechanics you will learn everything you’ll need to get started with game development. 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. All of the concepts taught in this book are applicable to other types of game, however, 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 (21 chapters)
Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Storing with prefabs


As we wish to fire this projectile when the player presses a key, we do not want the projectile to be in the scene by default, but instead want it to be stored and created when the key is pressed. For this reason we will store the object as a prefab, and use our script to instantiate (that is, create an instance of) it at the precise moment a key is pressed.

Note

Prefabs are Unity's way of storing GameObjects that have been set up in a particular way; for example, you may have configured an enemy soldier with particular scripts and properties that behaves a certain way. You can store this object as a prefab and instantiate it when necessary. Similarly you might have a differing soldier that behaves differently, this might be a different prefab, or you might create an instance of the first, and adjust settings in the soldier's components, making him faster or slower upon instantiation for example; the Prefab system gives you a lot of flexibility in this regard.

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