Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game engines are central to the video games we know and love. From the artwork to the mathematics that underpin the frames onscreen, the engine calls the shots. Aside from offering one of the leading 3D game engines, Unity also provides a superlative development tool ñ a tool that can produce professional standard games for Mac, PC, and the Unity Web Player. This book is a complete exercise in game development covering environments, physics, sound, particles, and much more, to get you up and working with Unity quickly. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of developing 3D games before getting to grips with development in Unity itself. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating simple game elements you will learn everything you'll need to get started with game development for the PC, Mac, and Web. This book is designed to cover a set of easy to follow examples, which culminate in the production of a First Person 3D game, complete with an interactive island environment. By introducing common concepts of game and 3D production, you'll explore Unity to make a character interact with the game world, and build puzzles for the player to solve, in order to complete the game. At the end of the book, you will have a fully working 3D game and all the skills required to extend the game further, giving your end-user, the player, the best experience possible. Soon you will be creating your own 3D games with ease!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Summary


Here we have looked at the key concepts, you'll need to understand and complete the exercises in this book. Due to space constraints, I cannot cover everything in depth, as 3D development is a vast area of study. With this in mind, I strongly recommend you to continue to read more on the topics discussed in this chapter, in order to supplement your study of 3D development. Each individual piece of software you encounter will have its own dedicated tutorials and resources dedicated to learning it. If you wish to learn 3D artwork to complement your work in Unity, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with your chosen package, after researching the list of tools that work with the Unity pipeline (see list in Chapter 2) and choosing which one suits you best.

Now that we've taken a brief look at 3D concepts and the processes used by Unity to create games, we'll begin using the software by creating the environment for our game.

In the following chapter, we'll get to grips with the terrain editor. With a physical height painting approach, the terrain editor is an easy to use starting point for any game with an outdoor environment. We'll use this to build an island, and in the ensuing chapters we'll add features to the island to create a minigame, in which the user must light a campfire by retrieving matches from a locked outpost. Let's get started!