Welcome to the world of Unity! In this book we will explore from beginning to end how to develop games utilizing what is one of the most exciting and accessible game development technologies available for mobile devices.
In this chapter you will learn the basics of getting up and running with Unity Technologies' game development product Unity. Together we will explore how to utilize this development platform to deliver games on iOS devices.
In this chapter we shall:
- Learn about the value of Unity as a development platform
- Install Unity
- Learn how to configure the Apple Developer Portal to support development and publishing
- Configure our development environment for publishing to an iOS device
- Publish a sample application to our iOS device
This may not sound like a lot, but with iOS development there are many things that you can do incorrectly, which will lead to difficulties when working with Unity. Rather than assume that you'll get it all right, we're going to talk through it step by step to make sure that you can spend your time building games and not trying to decipher mysterious error messages.
So let's get on with it…
This chapter assumes that you have already installed XCode and the Apple iOS SDK 4.x or later. If you don't have either of these tools installed, you can get them from http://developer.apple.com.
Further, it is assumed that you have downloaded and installed Unity from http://www.unity3d.com.
This chapter also assumes that you have set up an account at the iOS Dev Center located at http://developer.apple.com. Since iOS applications must be signed before they can be published to an application store, or distributed to devices, you must have an account set up and have the requisite certificates installed on your machine. There are a number of videos on the Dev Center website, which can help you get your certificates set up.
Also note that the screenshots in the book represent the Mac OSX version of Unity, as the OSX platform is the official development environment for iPhone applications.