Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2019 - Fourth Edition

By : Harrison Ferrone
Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2019 - Fourth Edition

By: Harrison Ferrone

Overview of this book

Learning to program in today’s technical landscape can be a daunting task, especially when faced with the sheer number of languages you have to choose from. Luckily, Learning C# with Unity 2019 removes the guesswork and starts you off on the path to becoming a confident, and competent, programmer using game development with Unity. You’ll start off small by learning the building blocks of programming, from variables, methods, and conditional statements to classes and object-oriented systems. After you have the basics under your belt you’ll explore the Unity interface, creating C# scripts, and translating your newfound knowledge into simple game mechanics. Throughout this journey, you’ll get hands-on experience with programming best practices and macro-level topics such as manager classes and flexible application architecture. By the end of the book, you’ll be familiar with intermediate C# topics like generics, delegates, and events, setting you up to take on projects of your own.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Programming Foundations and C#
7
Section 2: Scripting Game Mechanics in Unity
12
Section 3: Leveling Up Your C# Code

Variable scope

We're getting to the end of our shallow dive into variables, but there's still one more important topic we need to cover: scope. Similar to access modifiers determining which outside classes can grab a variable's information, variable scope is the term used to describe where a given variable exists and can be accessed within its containing class.

There are three main levels of variable scope in C#:

  • Global scope refers to a variable that can be accessed by an entire program, in this case, a game. C# doesn't directly support global variables, but the concept is useful in certain cases, which we'll cover in Chapter 10, Revisiting Types, Methods, and Classes
  • Class or member scope refers to a variable that is accessible anywhere in its containing class.
  • Local scope refers to a variable that is only accessible inside the specific block of code it's created in:

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