Book Image

Unity 4.x Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

By : Ryan Henson Creighton
Book Image

Unity 4.x Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

By: Ryan Henson Creighton

Overview of this book

Unity is one of the biggest game engines in the world, providing the user with a range of important tools that they need to bring their ideas into reality. Beginner game developers are optimistic, passionate, and ambitious, but that ambition can be dangerous! Too often, budding indie developers and hobbyists bite off more than they can chew. Games like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Fruit Ninja are fun, simple games that have delighted players and delivered big profits to their creators. This is the perfect climate for new game developers to succeed by creating simple games with Unity, starting today. This book teaches you the ins and outs of the unique Unity game engine interface. Clear and concise code examples written in both Unity Javascript and C# take you through the step-by-step process of building five small, functional games. With this understanding you can start making your own mark on the game industry! With absolutely no programming or game development experience, you will learn how to build five simple games in Unity by following step-by-step instructions, peppered with amusing analogies and anecdotes from an experienced indie developer. Following a primer on simplifying your game ideas to that single “something” that keeps players coming back for more, dive into the Unity game engine by creating a simple bat-and-ball game. From there, you'll build a complete memory game using only the Unity GUI system. After building a 2.5D mouse avoider game, you'll learn how to re-skin the project to completely change the game's theme. Incorporating everything you've learned, you'll return to complete the bat-and-ball game by adding scoring, replay flow, sound effects, and animations. Finally, in the new bonus chapter, you'll program some simple AI (Artificial Intelligence) for a tic tac toe game. "Unity 4.x Game Development by Example" is a fun and light-hearted exploration of one of the most powerful game engines on the market today. Find out what all the fuss is about by getting up to speed using this book!
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Unity 4.x Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Don't stop there – live a little!


We've glanced briefly at the key elements of the Unity interface, but there's no need to stop poking around. Far beyond the scope of this book, there is a wealth of menu options, buttons, and controls that we haven't covered. Why not explore those menus or start randomly clicking on things that you don't yet understand? Now is the time to safely break stuff. You didn't work hard to create the Angry Bots Demo, so why not mess around with it a little bit?

Some of the changes you make to the Demo will "stick", even if you don't explicitly choose to save your changes. Duplicate the entire Angry Bots Demo folder before you go crazy.

Here are some things to try:

  • Select some of the GameObjects in the Hierarchy panel and move them around in the Scene window using the Scene controls. What happens when you put an airlock in the middle of the sky? Can the player still pass through? What if you put the canisters or the computers over the player's head before the game starts? Do they fall, or do they hover? Can you remove objects to help the player careen off the edge of the balcony? What happens when he does?

  • Randomly right-click / alternate-click in the three different panels and read through the context menu options to see what you're getting yourself into.

  • Poke around in the GameObject | Create Other menu. There's a whole list of interesting things that you can add to this scene without even touching a 3D modeling program.

  • What happens when you delete the lights from the scene? Or the camera? Can you add another camera? More lights? How does that affect the Scene?

  • Can you move the player to another part of the Demo to change your starting position? Can you replace the audio files to make the gun "moo" whenever you fire it?

  • Download a picture of kittens from the Internet and see if you can wrap it around a boulder model. Kittens rock! You can pull the kitties into your project using the Assets | Import New Asset option in the menu.