Book Image

Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide

By : Thomas James Finnegan
Book Image

Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide

By: Thomas James Finnegan

Overview of this book

Powerful and continuing to grow, the mobile market has never been bigger and more demanding of great games. Android continues to prove itself as a strong contender in this challenging market. With Unity 3D, great games can be made for Android quickly and easily. With its great deployment system, the Android platform is now only one click away. Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide dives straight into making real, fully-functional games, with hands-on examples and step-by-step instructions to give you a firm grounding in Unity 3D and Android. Everything necessary for creating a complete gaming experience is covered and detailed throughout the course of this book. Using clear and practical examples that progressively build upon each other, this book guides you through the process of creating games in Unity for Android. Start by learning about all the great features that Unity and Android have to offer. Next, create a Tic-Tac-Toe game while learning all about interfaces. After that, learn about meshes, materials, and animations with the creation of a tank battle game. You will then learn how to expand your game's environment with the addition of shadows and a skybox. Adding on this, you will also learn how to expand the tank battle by creating enemies and using path finding to chase the player. Next, explore touch and tilt controls with the creation of a space fighter game. Then, learn about physics while recreating the most popular mobile game on the market. You will then expand the space fighter game with the addition of all the special effects that make a game great. Finally, complete your experience by learning the optimization techniques required to keep your games running smoothly. While Unity is available for both Mac and Windows, the book is presented working from a Windows environment. Programming in Unity is possible in C#, JavaScript, and Boo. This book will be working in C# and the final projects will be provided in C# and JavaScript. From nothing to a fully-featured mobile game, Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide takes you through everything it takes to create your next game for the Android platform.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding AI and pathfinding


AI is, as you might have guessed, artificial intelligence. In the broadest sense this is anything an inanimate object might do to appear to be making decisions. You are probably most familiar with this concept from video games. When a character, not controlled by the player, selects a weapon to use and a target to use it on, this is AI.

In its most complex form, AI attempts to mimic full human intelligence. However, there is still far too much happening incredibly fast for this to truly succeed. Video games do not need to reach nearly this far. We are primarily concerned with making our characters appear intelligent, but still conquerable by our players. Usually, this means not allowing characters to act on more information than a real player might have. Adjusting how much information characters have and can act on is a good way to adjust the level of difficulty in a game.

Pathfinding is a subset of AI. We use it all the time, though you have probably never...