Game development is a broad and complex task. An interdisciplinary field covering subjects as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, character animation, digital painting, and sound editing. All those areas of knowledge can materialize as the production of hundreds (or thousands!) of multimedia and data assets. A special software application—the game engine—is required to consolidate all of those assets into a single product.
Game engines are specialized pieces of software, which used to belong to an esoteric domain. They were expensive, inflexible, and extremely complicated to use. They were for big studios or hardcore programmers only. Then along came Unity.
Unity represents true democratization of game development. An engine and multimedia editing environment that is user-friendly and versatile. It has free and indie versions and a Pro version that includes even more features. As we write this preface, Unity offers modules capable of publishing games to Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, XBox 360, Wii U, and PS3; as well as web-based games using the Unity plugins.
Today, Unity is used by a diverse community of developers all around the world. Some are students and hobbyists, but many are commercial organizations ranging from garage developers to international studios, using Unity to make a huge number of games—some you might have already played in one platform or another.
This book provides over 100 Unity game development recipes. Some recipes demonstrate Unity application techniques for multimedia features, including working with animations and using preinstalled package systems. Other recipes develop game components with C# scripts, ranging from working with data structures and data file manipulation, to artificial intelligence algorithms for computer controlled characters.
If you want to develop quality games in an organized and straightforward way, and want to learn how to create useful game components and solve common problems, then both Unity and this book are for you.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Unity 4.x, is written for those who have just started, or are about to start, using Unity 4.x. It covers software installation, interface concepts, user preferences, and some workflow tips.
Chapter 2, Using Cameras, will explain recipes covering techniques for controlling and enhancing your game's camera. This chapter will present interesting solutions to work with both single and multiple cameras.
Chapter 3, Creating Maps and Materials, contains recipes that will give you—whether you are a game artist or not—a better understanding on how to use maps and materials in Unity 4.x. It should be a great resource for exercising your image editing skills.
Chapter 4, Creating GUIs, is filled with GUI (Graphical User Interface) recipes to help you increase the entertainment and enjoyment of your games through the quality of the interactive visual elements. You'll learn a wide range of GUI techniques, including working with scroll wheels for input, and displaying directional compasses, radars, and graphical inventory icons.
Chapter 5, Controlling Animations, demonstrates focusing on character animation, how to take advantage of Unity's new animation system—Mecanim. It covers everything from basic character setup to procedural animation and ragdoll physics.
Chapter 6, Playing and Manipulating Sounds, is dedicated to making sound effects and soundtrack music in your game more interesting. It also touches on playback and volume control techniques.
Chapter 7, Working with External Resource Files and Devices, throws light on how external data can enhance your game in ways, such as adding renewable content and communicating with websites. External devices, such as the Microsoft Kinect, can totally change the game's interactions. Learn about communicating with external resources and devices in this chapter.
Chapter 8, Working with External Text Files and XML Data, provides recipes for different methods to work with text files in general, and with XML text data specifically. This chapter is included because XML and other text-based data is common and very useful, both being computer and human readable.
Chapter 9, Managing Object States and Controlling Their Movements, relates to the many games that involve moving computer-controlled objects and characters. For many games animation components can be sufficient. However, other games use artificial intelligence for directional logic. This chapter presents a range of such directional recipes, which can lead to games with a richer and more exciting user experience.
Chapter 10, Improving Games with Extra Features and Optimization, provides several recipes providing some ideas for adding some extra features to your game (pausing, slow motion, 3D stereography, and securing online games). The rest of the recipes in this chapter provide examples of how to investigate and improve the efficiency and performance of your game's code.
Chapter 11, Taking Advantage of Unity Pro, is a concise chapter with interesting uses for some Unity Pro capabilities. It includes recipes for sound, render texture, video texture, and image effects.