When Packt asked me to write this book, we had in mind something more modest than the book that you have today. While I was writing, I realized how many books can be found on the shelves that teach the basics without giving any practical insight on how to use that knowledge to actually make a game. Therefore, I slightly deviated the course of this book. As a result, it has changed into a somewhat solid manual about Unity, with a particular focus on 2D game development. The book that you are holding in your hands (either hard copy or on your tablet) is the outcome of a lot of effort trying to create something that is easy for the readers to understand, without sacrificing completeness or practical use of the different tools learned. Thus, everything is explained in detail, along with many examples of usage.
Also, I felt that another big deficiency of many books is the lack of Homework sections that provide the reader with exercises to improve her/his skills. In fact, I believe that these sections are important, since they provide a common ground in case you want to challenge yourself and take the discussion beyond the book with your friends, course mates, or colleagues. In the field of game development, it's important to collaborate, because a game is often the result of the coordinate efforts of many talented and passionate people.
For this book, I decided to support the learning of the different tools we will face by building a tower defense game on the joyful and sugary theme of cupcakes, sprinkles, and sweet-toothed pandas who will try to bite the delicious player's cake. This project will guide the reader through the book, and help her/him to develop a practical skillset as well.
Whoever you are, a hungry student of knowledge, a professor looking for a book to adopt in your classes, an expert in game development trying out Unity (or willing to extend your understanding of Unity), or just a passionate hobbyist, I hope you will enjoy this book.
Chapter 1, A Flat World in Unity, is an introduction to the 2D world of Unity. You will discover how to set up your project, import assets, and make them ready to use. In particular, we will go through in detail on how to use the Sprite Editor.
Chapter 2, Baking Cupcake Towers, teaches you how to integrate code within your game. We will cover the important and fundamental concepts of Unity and we will see how to script game objects by starting to create the behaviors of our cupcake towers for the tower defense game we are building.
Chapter 3, Communicating with the Player – the User Interface, deals with the important task to provide feedback to your players through the use of user interfaces (UIs). You will learn how to design them by discovering the general principles behind them, and learn how to implement any UI within the UI system of Unity.
Chapter 4, No Longer Alone – Sweet-Toothed Pandas Strike, introduces us to the terrible sweet-toothed Pandas, who will try to steal the player's cake. You will learn how to bring characters to life by using the powerful animation system of Unity Mechanim, starting from Sprite-sheets.
Chapter 5, The Secret Ingredient Is a Dash of Physics, takes you by hand deep down into the secrets of physics and explains them in a clear and easy way. You will grasp the basics of physics, and learn how to use the 2D Physics engine of Unity.
Chapter 6, Through a Sea of Sprinkles – Navigation in Artificial Intelligence, is an introduction to the universe of artificial intelligence applied to video games. You will learn the basics principles and how to implement a navigation system in Unity for 2D (or even 3D) games, so that we can make our terrible sweet-toothed Pandas move!
Chapter 7, Trading Cupcakes and the Ultimate Battle for the Cake – Gameplay Programming, wraps everything we saw and learned in the previous chapters to conclude the tower defense game. In particular, we will deal with gameplay programming, which is the glue between the different parts of your game.
Chapter 8, What Is beyond the Cake?, explores different aspects of our game and game development in general. You will discover different tips, tricks, and suggestions on how to improve the game we built in this book, along with improving your own skills to become a better game developer. Then, the chapter will give you an understanding of parts of the game development pipeline, which are not strictly tied to the development of the game itself. Thus, you will dive into different topics ranging from playtesting, optimizations, team management and work, documentation, getting ready to publish your game, marketing, social media, game protections, to even localization.