How it works...

Displaying a "Hello World" UI text message

Styling substrings with rich text

Displaying a digital clock

Displaying a digital countdown timer

Creating a message that fades away

Displaying a perspective 3D Text Mesh

Making the text crawl as it does in the movie

Where to learn more

Creating sophisticated text with TextMeshPro

Rich text substrings for colors, effects, and sprites

Working with 2D sprites and UI Image components

Creating a Fungus character dialog with images

Free Chapter

Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs

Creating UI Buttons to move between scenes

Animating button properties on mouseover

Organizing image panels and changing panel depths via buttons

Moving up or down by just one position, using scripted methods

Displaying the value of an interactive UI Slider

Displaying a countdown timer graphically with a UI Slider

Setting custom mouse cursors for 2D and 3D GameObjects

Setting custom mouse cursors for UI controls

Interactive text entry with Input Field

Toggles and radio buttons via toggle groups

Creating text and image icon UI Drop-down menus

Adding images to a Dropdown control

Displaying a radar to indicate the relative locations of objects

The FindAndDisplayBlipsForTag(...) method

The CalculateBlipPositionAndDrawBlip (...) method

The NormalizedPosition(...) method

The CalculateBlipPosition(...) method

The DrawBlip() method

Inventory and Advanced UIs

Creating a simple 2D mini-game – SpaceGirl

Displaying single object pickups with carrying and not-carrying text

The PlayerInventory script class

The PlayerInventoryDisplay script class

Collecting multiple items and display the total number carried

Alternative – combining all the responsibilities into a single script

Displaying single-object pickups with carrying and not-carrying icons

Displaying multiple pickups of the same object with multiple status icons

Revealing icons for multiple object pickups by changing the size of a tiled image

Using panels to visually outline the inventory UI area and individual items

Creating a C# inventory slot UI to display scripted components

Modifying the game for a second inventory panel for keys

Using UI Grid Layout Groups to automatically populate a panel

Automatically inferring the number of inventory slots based on the number of GameObjects tagged Star

Adding a horizontal scroll bar to the inventory slot display

Automatically changing the grid cell size based on the number of slots in the inventory

Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as a list of text via a dynamic list of scripted PickUp objects

Ordering items in the inventory list alphabetically

Using a Dictionary and Enums to display text totals for different objects

Creating a runtime UI Toolkit interface

Playing and Manipulating Sounds

Playing different one-off sound effects with a single AudioSource component

Playing a sound at a static point in 3D world space

Playing and controlling different sounds each with its own AudioSource component

Creating just-in-time AudioSource components at runtime through C# scripting

Adding the CreateAudioSource(...) method as an extension to the MonoBehavior class

Delaying before playing a sound

Preventing an audio clip from restarting if it is already playing

Waiting for the audio to finish playing before auto-destructing an object

Audio visualization from sample spectral data

Adding visualizations to a second AudioSource component

Trying out different Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) window types

Synchronizing simultaneous and sequential music to create a simple 140 bpm music-loop manager

Adding visualizations to the four playing loops

Further reading

Creating 3D Objects, Terrains, Textures, and Materials

Creating 3D primitives and adding materials and textures

Enhancing the scene – adding a spotlight and wood material

Creating a new Material asset file in the Project window and then setting its Albedo to a texture

Converting and importing 3D models into a project

Highlighting GameObject materials on mouseover

Collider needed for custom meshes

Changing the material's color in response to mouse events

Fading the transparency of a material

Destroying objects when fading is complete

Using the GameObject's alpha as our starting alpha value

Using a coroutine for our fading loop

Creating geometry with ProBuilder

Creating a house with ProBuilder

Creating and texture-painting terrains

Height painting terrains

2D Animation and Physics

Flipping a sprite horizontally – the DIY approach

Flipping a sprite horizontally – using Animator State Chart and transitions

Instantaneous swapping

Animating body parts for character movement events

Creating a three-frame animation clip to make a platform continually animate

Copying the animation relative to a new parent GameObject

Making a platform start falling once stepped on using a Trigger to move the animation from one state to another

Creating animation clips from sprite sheet sequences

Creating a platform game with tiles and tilemaps

Tile palettes for objects and walls

Using sprite placeholders to create a simple physics scene

Editing polygon Colliders for more realistic 2D physics

Creating an explosionForce method for 2D physics objects

Clipping via Sprite Masking

Characters, Game Kits, and Starter Assets

Creating a game with the 3D Game Kit

Creating a game with the 2D Game Kit

Importing third-party 3D models and animations from Mixamo

Looping the animation

Scripting events to control when animation clips are played

Swapping the Standard Assets Ethan for a different character

Importing a 3D model and adding an Animation Controller

Using scripts to control 3D animations

Importing and using a UMA free character

Getting started with the 2021 Starter Assets package

Further reading

Web Server Communication and Online Version Control

Setting up a leaderboard using PHP and a database

SQLite, PHP, and database servers

Extracting the full leaderboard data for display within Unity

Using secret game codes to secure your leaderboard scripts

Learn more about DVCS

Learn more about Git at the command line

Using Bitbucket and Sourcetree visual applications

Learning about Mercurial rather than Git

Adding a Unity project to a local Git repository, and pushing files up to GitHub

Unity project version control using GitHub for Unity

Controlling and Choosing Positions

Using a rectangle to constrain 2D Player object movement

Drawing a gizmo yellow rectangle to visually show a bounding rectangle

Player control of a 3D GameObject (and limiting movement within a rectangle)

Drawing a gizmo yellow rectangle to visually show a bounding rectangle

Drawing thick gizmo lines

Choosing destinations – finding a random spawn point

Avoiding errors due to an empty array

Moving objects by clicking on them

Firing projectiles in the direction of movement

Navigation Meshes and Agents

NPC to travel to destination while avoiding obstacles

NPC to seek or flee from a moving object

Using a Debug Ray to show a source-to-destination line

Constantly updating the NavMeshAgent's destination to flee from the player's current location

Maintaining a constant distance from the target ("lurking" mode!)

Point-and-click move to object

Creating a mouseover yellow highlight

Point-and-click move to tile

Using a yellow debug ray to show the destination of the AI agent

Point-and-click raycast with user-defined, higher-cost navigation areas

More intelligent pathfinding by setting different costs for custom-defined navigation areas such as mud and water

Improving the UX by updating a "gaze" cursor each frame

NPC NavMeshAgent to follow waypoints in a sequence

Working with arrays of waypoints

Increased flexibility with the WayPoint class

Controlling object group movement through flocking

Creating a movable NavMesh Obstacle

Cameras and Rendering Pipelines

Creating the basic scene for this chapter

Working with a fixed Main Camera

Changing how much of the screen a camera renders to

Using Render Textures to send camera output to places other than the screen

Inverting our mirror camera horizontally

A simple snapshot of a scene at runtime

Working with Unity's multipurpose camera rig

Using Cinemachine ClearShot to switch cameras to keep the player in shot

Unity Cinemachine tutorials

Will Goldstone's ClearShot tutorial

Adam Myhill's Cinemachine blog posts

Reading the installed Cinemachine documentation

Cinemachine and Timeline

Letting the player switch to a Cinemachine FreeLook camera

Creating a project with the URP

Creating an HDRP project with an HDRI skybox

Adding a vignette effect

Shader Graphs and Video Players

Playing videos by manually adding a VideoPlayer component to a GameObject

Using scripting to control video playback on scene textures

Downloading an online video (rather than a clip)

Ensuring a movie is prepared before playing

Ensuring that the movie has been prepared before playing it with coroutines

Outputting video playback to a RenderTexture asset

Using scripting to play a sequence of videos back to back

Creating and using a simple Shader Graph

Creating a glow effect with Shader Graph

Toggling a Shader Graph color glow effect through C# code

Shader Graph online resources

Video player online resources

Advanced Topics - Gizmos, Automated Testing, and More

Using Gizmo to show the currently selected object in the Scene window

Saving and loading player data – using static properties

Hiding the score before the first attempt is completed

Loading game data from a text file map

Saving data to a file while the game is running

Creating a default test script from the Project window's Create menu

Edit mode minimum skeleton unit test script

Shorter tests with values in the assertion

Expected value followed by the actual value

Parameterizing tests with a data provider

Unit testing a simple health script class

Creating and executing a unit test in PlayMode

PlayMode testing a door animation

PlayMode and unit testing a player health bar with events, logging, and exceptions

Reporting Code Coverage testing

Running simple Python scripts inside Unity

Further reading

Particle Systems and Other Visual Effects

Exploring Unity's Particle Pack and reusing samples for your own games

Creating a simple particle system from scratch

Using Texture Sheets to simulate fire with a particle system

Making particles collide with scene objects

Simulating an explosion

Using Invoke to delay the execution of an explosion

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)

Setting up Unity for VR

Setting up an Oculus Quest/2 in Developer Mode

Creating a VR project for the Oculus Quest/2

Build failure due to Android version

Build failure due to "namespace cannot be found" error

Sideloading APK files to an Android device (such as the Quest headset)

Creating a VR project using the Mock HMD device

Working with the Mozilla demo WebXR project

Using GitHub Pages to publish your WebXR project for free

Learning more about the WebXR example project

Fixing pink (shader/material) problems

The community maintaining more up-to-date XR resources

Fixing obsolete code errors

Adding 360-degree videos to a VR project

Playing 360-degree videos on the surface of a 3D object

Exploring the Unity AR samples

Targeting iOS device builds

Allowing Android APK file downloads on your phone

Setting up Unity for AR

Build failure due to Android version

Build failure due to Vulkan API graphics settings

Creating a simple AR Foundation project

Detecting and highlighting planes with AR Foundation

Creating an AR furniture previewer by detecting horizontal planes