Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2020 - Fifth Edition

By : Harrison Ferrone
Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2020 - Fifth Edition

By: Harrison Ferrone

Overview of this book

Over the years, the Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity series has established itself as a popular choice for getting up to speed with C#, a powerful and versatile programming language that can be applied in a wide array of application areas. This book presents a clear path for learning C# programming from the ground up without complex jargon or unclear programming logic, all while building a simple game with Unity. This fifth edition has been updated to introduce modern C# features with the latest version of the Unity game engine, and a new chapter has been added on intermediate collection types. Starting with the basics of software programming and the C# language, you’ll learn the core concepts of programming in C#, including variables, classes, and object-oriented programming. Once you’ve got to grips with C# programming, you’ll enter the world of Unity game development and discover how you can create C# scripts for simple game mechanics. Throughout the book, you’ll gain hands-on experience with programming best practices to help you take your Unity and C# skills to the next level. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to leverage the C# language to build your own real-world Unity game development projects.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

A helping hand from MonoBehavior

Since C# scripts are classes, how does Unity know to make some scripts components and not others? The short answer is that LearningCurve (and any script created in Unity) inherits from MonoBehavior (another class). This tells Unity that the C# class can be transformed into a component.

The topic of class inheritance is a bit advanced for this point of your programming journey; think of it as the MonoBehaviour class lending a few of its variables and methods to LearningCurveChapter 5, Working with Classes, Struct, and OOP, will cover class inheritance in practical detail.

The Start() and Update() methods that we've used belong to MonoBehavior, which Unity runs automatically on any script attached to a GameObject. The Start() method runs once when the scene starts playing, while the Update() method runs once per frame (depending on the frame rate of your machine). 

Now that you're familiarity with Unity's documentation has gotten a nice bump, I've put together a short optional challenge for you to tackle!