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

The Unity Asset Store


There were once many different companies that offered packages of Unity-ready materials and models that you could license for use in your games. Unity consolidated them under one roof in their online Unity Asset Store. To access the store, open Unity 3D and navigate to Window | Asset Store. Here are a few stand-out innovations that have seen a lot of use in the Unity community:

2DToolkit: Prior to the release of Unity 4.3, creating 2D games in Unity was tough, but not impossible. Packages like 2DToolkit provided sprite sheet and texture packing systems to ease 2D development.

NGUI: Another very popular package is NGUI, which does a great deal of GUI heavy lifting for you, using a more user-friendly system than Unity's built-in immediate mode GUI.

playMaker: This snap-together system provides LEGO-like behavior blocks that you can link together; no programming required.

Asset packs: There is a vast number of asset packages with everything from modeled airplanes to medieval dungeons that you can use to prototype your games. I strongly urge you to use whatever help you can to get your game finished. Paying $30 to save yourself months of work isn't cheating—it's just using your head. If it comes down to a choice between paying a few bucks and never finishing your game, it's time to break open your piggy bank.

The cats over at Unity Technologies aren't stupid. If they see a certain tool performing very well on the Unity Asset Store, it's a safe bet that they're planning to add it to a future release of Unity. That's why tools like NGUI and 2DToolkit see less use as their popularity peaks: Unity recreates or even hires the creators of these systems to improve their core product!