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

Time for action – declare a variable to store the Screen midpoint


  1. Modify your Script so that it looks like this (you can get rid of the Debug.Log() function call):

      function Update () {
        var halfW : float = Screen.width/2;
        transform.position.x = (Input.mousePosition.x -halfW)/halfW;
      }

That code looks a lot cleaner. Not only is it easier to read, but we've knocked out some of those confusing brackets in the second line.

What just happened – we've gone too var

We've used the special var keyword to declare our variable (bucket). I chose the name halfW, which is short for "half width"—half the width of the screen. You can choose any name you like for a variable as long as it isn't a reserved Unity keyword, and it doesn't break any of the naming rules that we discussed when we looked at naming functions. For example, 1myvar funfun will not work, because it begins with a number and has a space in the middle. Also, it sounds ridiculous and doesn't make any sense. Try your best to keep your...