Book Image

Unity 4.x Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

By : Ryan Henson Creighton
Book Image

Unity 4.x Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

By: Ryan Henson Creighton

Overview of this book

Unity is one of the biggest game engines in the world, providing the user with a range of important tools that they need to bring their ideas into reality. Beginner game developers are optimistic, passionate, and ambitious, but that ambition can be dangerous! Too often, budding indie developers and hobbyists bite off more than they can chew. Games like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Fruit Ninja are fun, simple games that have delighted players and delivered big profits to their creators. This is the perfect climate for new game developers to succeed by creating simple games with Unity, starting today. This book teaches you the ins and outs of the unique Unity game engine interface. Clear and concise code examples written in both Unity Javascript and C# take you through the step-by-step process of building five small, functional games. With this understanding you can start making your own mark on the game industry! With absolutely no programming or game development experience, you will learn how to build five simple games in Unity by following step-by-step instructions, peppered with amusing analogies and anecdotes from an experienced indie developer. Following a primer on simplifying your game ideas to that single “something” that keeps players coming back for more, dive into the Unity game engine by creating a simple bat-and-ball game. From there, you'll build a complete memory game using only the Unity GUI system. After building a 2.5D mouse avoider game, you'll learn how to re-skin the project to completely change the game's theme. Incorporating everything you've learned, you'll return to complete the bat-and-ball game by adding scoring, replay flow, sound effects, and animations. Finally, in the new bonus chapter, you'll program some simple AI (Artificial Intelligence) for a tic tac toe game. "Unity 4.x Game Development by Example" is a fun and light-hearted exploration of one of the most powerful game engines on the market today. Find out what all the fuss is about by getting up to speed using this book!
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Unity 4.x Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Why burn this book and run away screaming?


Of course, no game development tool is perfect, and in certain areas, other tools have the advantage over Unity. Here are a few places where Unity doesn't stack up against its rivals:

  • Learning Curve: Even with the abundance of training available, Unity largely requires developers to learn how to program and to deal with complex concepts such as shaders and the third dimension. If you've come to Unity after hearing "it makes game development simple! Anyone can do it!", you've been fed a hot bowl full of filthy lies.

  • Cost: Bang for buck notwithstanding, when you get into a situation where you're buying pro versions of Unity for an entire development team, and the Unity Asset Server on top of that, as well as copies of the deployment add-ons, the cost begins to add up. I may have knocked XCode in the previous section, but it does have the advantage of being free.

  • Purity: If you're coming from a "pure" programming background, some of the ways in which you solve different problems in Unity may seem outright sacrilegious to you. If the thought of working within a GUI and dragging things on top of other things to create reflexive relationships gives you the willies, you may not dig the way Unity gets things done.