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 – scripting the character


Let's do exactly that! We'll create a new Script, and use what we already know about following the mouse, to snap the player character to our mouse movement. Then we'll tell the character which animation cycle to use when he's moving around.

  1. Create a new JavaScript. Rename it Character. If you're keeping your project tidy, consider creating a new folder called Scripts and dropping your new script into it.

  2. Open the script and type in this code beneath the #pragma strict line:

    var lastX:float; // this will store the last position of the character
    var isMoving:boolean = false; //flags whether or not the player is in motion
    function Start()
    {
       animation.Stop();  // this stops Unity from playing the character's default animation.
    }
    
    function Update()
    {
       transform.position.x = (Input.mousePosition.x)/20;
    }
    

    So far, all this should look very familiar. We're using the same type of commands we used with the keep-up game to make the GameObject follow the...