Making a game from scratch is no easy task. Games, even those that look basic at first glance, are a collection of elements, or assets, belonging to different fields of practice and requiring distinctive skills to be assembled.
With this book, we aim to provide you with what you need to know to make games with Unity.
Each chapter covers a single topic and provides a set of practical recipes to learn how things are actually done in Unity.
The following is the list of topics we cover with this cookbook:
Chapter 1, Importing 3D Models and Animations, deals with the process of exporting 3D models from Maya into Unity and the operations required to correctly set up imported FBX with models and animations in Unity Inspector.
Chapter 2, 2D Assets for Unity, explains how textures are imported in Unity, how to set them up, and what a texture atlas is. It also deals with materials and how to add lights to a scene.
Chapter 3, Animating a Game Character, discusses Mecanim, the built-in tool to animate characters in Unity, introduced with Unity 4. It explains how to import and configure animation clips, how to create transitions between them, and how to blend animations.
Chapter 4, Taking Control, shows how to improve the graphic appeal of your character by adding a normal map to its material, and it also introduces the topic of game controls, explaining the difference between the Character Controller and the Rigidbody components.
Chapter 5, Building Up the Game Level, shows how to create the assets to build up an actual game level made of platforms and gaps for the character to jump. We also implement the game controls and improve the gameplay by adding collectible game objects.
Chapter 6, Game Scenes and the Graphic Interface, explains how multiple scenes are added to a game. We also introduce the topic of finite state machines to control the screen flow of the game. Finally, we explain the basics to create a Graphic User Interface.
Chapter 7, Improving the Gaming Experience, shows you how to add audio to the prototype, by importing and configuring audio clips. We also introduce Particle Systems and show you how video clips can be played in the scene.
Chapter 8, Sprites, Spritesheets, and 2D Animation in Unity, deals with sprites, spritesheets, and sprite animation. It also explains the features of the built-in Sprite Editor of Unity.