Book Image

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game Engines such as Unity are the power-tools behind the games we know and love. Unity is one of the most widely-used and best loved packages for game development and is used by everyone, from hobbyists to large studios, to create games and interactive experiences for the web, desktop, mobile, and console. With Unity’s intuitive, easy to learn toolset and this book – it’s never been easier to become a game developer. 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 – prototyping a simple scenario, and then creating a larger game. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating game mechanics you will learn everything you’ll need to get started with game development. 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. All of the concepts taught in this book are applicable to other types of game, however, 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 (21 chapters)
Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


Here we have looked at the key concepts you will need to understand and complete the exercises in this book. However, 3D is a detailed discipline that you will continue to learn not only with Unity, but in other areas also. With this in mind, you are recommended 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, you are recommended to familiarize yourself with your chosen package, after researching the list of tools that work with the Unity pipeline and choosing which one suits you the best.

Now that we've taken a brief look at 3D concepts and the processes used by Unity to create games, we'll begin by completing a simple exercise before getting started on the larger game element of this book.

In the following chapter, we'll begin with a short exercise in which you will prototype a simple game mechanic using Primitive shapes generated by the engine itself, and some basic coding to get you started in C Sharp (C#)/ Javascript. It is important to kick-start your Unity learning with a simple example using primitives, as you will often find yourself prototypinggame ideas in this manner once you feel more comfortable in using Unity.

After this, we'll move on to the larger exercise of the book, looking at game environments and getting 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 mini-game, in which the user must light a campfire by retrieving matches from a locked outpost. Let's get started!