Only Unity fits the bill of being a game engine that allows you to create a full 3D game for free, and with phenomenal community support. This book will equip you with the skills to create professional looking games at no cost.
Unity 3 Game Development Hotshot will teach you how to exploit the full array of Unity 3D's technology in order to create an advanced gaming experience for the user, with eight exciting and challenging projects that provide a step-by-step explanation, diagrams, and screenshots to help you achieve that goal.
Every project is designed to push your Unity skills to the very limits and beyond. You will create a hero/heroine will be used in an RPG game. You will create a menu for the RPG game allowing you to customize your character with powerups, armor, and weapons. You will shade, model, rig, and animate your hero/heroine, so that they start to look more like a character from Final Fantasy than a simple sprite.
Now for some damage—rocket launchers! Typically the most powerful weapon in any first-person shooter, you will create a rocket launcher that has fire and smoke particles and most importantly causes splash damage for that all-important area effect. You will create AI-controlled enemies for your hero/heroine to eliminate the rocket launcher. We will create an interactive world that is destructible, so if the rocket launchers miss their target they will damage the surrounding environment. Finally, you learn to save and load so you can take a break from the action for life's necessities like going to the bathroom. The final touch will be for you to upload your scores online so everyone can see the carnage.
Project 1, Develop a Sprite and Platform Game: This project will show the user how to create a sprite animation for a 2D platform game. There will be an explanation of the difference between a perspective and orthographic camera, how to set up a background camera and the character camera, how to create a 2D sprite from your texture (using mainTexture and mainTextureOffset function in Unity), how to set up a sprite sheet, as well as the jumping and gravity animations.
Project 2, Create a Menu for an RPG Game- Add Powerups, Weapons, and Armor: This project will use the first project to create a cool and complex UI that is mostly used in the RPG game. The project starts by creating the menu window with OnGUI(), which will include the tab button for the user to go to different menus, and be able to manage the items, change the armor or weapon for the character, and choose the items and skills.
Project 3, Model and Shade your Hero/Heroine: We will start by exporting the 3D character model from 3D Studio MAX with the right unit scale and rotation by using the FBX exporter from 3D Studio Max and import it to Unity. Then, we will write a custom shader by using the new surface shader, which will be available from version 3.0.
Project 4, Add Character Control and Animation to your Hero/Heroine: Beginning with setting up the walk, run, idle, jump, and fall animations, we will adapt the built-in third-person controller in Unity to create a custom third-person controller. We will also use the character controller, cross fade animation, and the camera to follow our character.
Project 5, Build a Rocket Launcher!: In this project, we will create a first-person controller similar to the Resident Evil Style with the character animation. We will create a rocket launcher, rocket, and the particle effect by using the prefab and instantiate function to clone the object.
Project 6, Create Smart AI: This project will continue from the last project, and we will create an AI enemy and make it smart enough to follow our character, shoot at us, and follow the way point. We will also use the Gizmo class to help us show the direction of the AI.
Project 7, Forge a Destructible and Interactive Virtual World: We will use the new unity built-in beast lightmap to create a lightmap to make the world more realistic. Then, we will create the Physics object in the scene that will react with our character by walking through it or shooting at it.
Project 8, Let the World See the Carnage! Save, Load, and Post High Scores: This project will show you how to load, save, and post your high score by using playerPref. We will also learn to make the web game load faster and not let the user wait too long by using streaming when we publish from Unity.
Appendix A, Important Functions: This appendix includes the details of some important functions such as, Awake(), Start(), and so on, sourced from Unity scripting reference.
Appendix B, Coroutines and Yield: This appendix includes the explanation of Coroutines/Yield and how to use them, sourced from Unity scripting reference.
Appendix C, Major Differences between C# and Unity JavaScript: This appendix shows the differences between C# and Unity JavaScript by using examples sourced from the Unity answer website and Unity scripting reference.
Appendix D, Shaders and Cg/HLSL Programming: This appendix explains the structure of the Shaders and Cg/HLSL language, basic function in CG/HLSL, and so on, sourced from Unity scripting reference and NVIDIA website.