Chapter 1: Designing a Game from Scratch

Welcome to the first chapter of the book! I am sure you are as super excited as I am to start this amazing journey into game development with Unity. We will be approaching game development in four parts. First, we will be talking about the basics of game development, looking at topics such as how to design your game before you start coding, and then we will prototype a simple first level using Unity. Then, we will dive into graphics to find out the look and feel of a good game. Later, we will learn how to get everything moving through the use of scripting; and, finally, we will see how you can finish and publish your game. As you go through the chapters, you will apply every concept to a full game project, so you will end the book with a fully functional shooter game.

In this chapter, we will design our game, Super Shooter. This phase is known as pre-production, where we will create a development plan. Our game design will include all the functionality we want in our game: the player character, the non-player characters, game assets, animations, and more. We will use screen mock-ups, as well as a narrative, to document our game's design. We will look at related concepts regarding the use of Unity for our game along the way. We will be discussing which pieces of documentation are necessary for all the design work we will be doing throughout this chapter.

Specifically, we will examine the following concepts in this chapter:

• Game concept
• Game characters
• Gameplay
• The difficulty balance
• Documentation