Unity 5.x By Example

Table of Contents

Unity 5.x By Example

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. The Coin Collection Game – Part 1

Game design

Getting started – Unity and projects

Projects and project folders

Importing assets

Starting a level

Transformations and navigation

Scene building

Lighting and sky

Play testing and the Game tab

Adding a water plane

Adding a coin to collect

Summary

2. Project A – the Collection Game Continued

Creating a coin material

C# scripting in Unity

Counting coins

Code Sample 2.3

Collecting coins

Code Sample 2.5

Coins and prefabs

Timers and countdowns

Code Sample 2.6

Celebrations and fireworks!

Code Sample 2.7

Play testing

Building

Summary

3. Project B – the Space Shooter

Looking ahead – the completed project

Getting started with a space shooter

Creating a player object

Player input

Code Sample 3.1

Configuring the game camera

Bounds locking

Code Sample 3.2

Health

Code Sample 3.3

Death and particles

Code Sample 3.4

Enemies

Code Sample 3.6

Code Sample 3.7

Code Sample 3.8

Enemy spawning

Code Sample 3.9

Summary

4. Continuing the Space Shooter

Guns and gun turrets

Ammo prefabs

Code Sample 4-1

Ammo spawning

Code Sample 4.2

Code Sample 4.3

User controls

Scores and scoring – UI and text objects

Working with scores – scripting with text

Code Sample 4.4

Polishing

Testing and diagnosis

Building

Summary

5. Project C – a 2D Adventure

A 2D Adventure – getting started

Importing assets

Creating an environment – getting started

Environment Physics

Creating a player

Scripting the player movement

Code Sample 5.1

Optimization

Summary

6. Continuing the 2D Adventure

Moving platforms

Code Sample 6.1

Creating other scenes – levels 2 and 3

Kill zones

Code Sample 6.2

The UI health bar

Code Sample 6.3

Ammo and hazards

Gun turrets and ammo

NPCs and quests

Code Sample 6.8

Summary

7. Project D – Intelligent Enemies

An overview of the project

Getting started

Terrain construction

Navigation and navigation meshes

Building an NPC

Code Sample 7.1

Creating patrolling NPCs

Summary

8. Continuing with Intelligent Enemies

Enemy AI – range of sight

Code Sample 8.1

An overview of Finite State Machines

Code Sample 8.2

The Patrol state

Code Sample 8.3

The Chase state

Code Sample 8.4

The Attack state

Code Sample 8.5

Summary

Index

Unity 5.x By Example

Unity 5.x By Example

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: March 2016

Production reference: 1180316

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78588-838-0

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author

Alan Thorn

Reviewer

Francesco Sapio

Commissioning Editor

Amarabha Banerjee

Acquisition Editor

Nadeem Bagban

Content Development Editor

Preeti Singh

Technical Editors

Suwarna Patil

Bharat Patil

Copy Editor

Tasneem Fatehi

Project Coordinator

Shweta H Birwatkar

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Monica Ajmera Mehta

Production Coordinator

Arvindkumar Gupta

Cover Work

Arvindkumar Gupta

About the Author

Alan Thorn is an award-winning author, mathematician, and independent video game developer based in London, UK. He is the founder of the game development studio, Wax Lyrical Games, and the creator of the critically acclaimed PC adventure game, Baron Wittard: Nemesis of Ragnarok. Alan works freelance for some of the world's largest entertainment corporations. He has lectured on game development at some of the most prestigious institutions in Europe and written nine books on games programming, including the highly popular Teach Yourself Games Programming, Game Engine Design and Implementation, and UDK Game Development. Some of Alan's other interests include computing, mathematics, graphics, and philosophy. More information about his company, Wax Lyrical Games, can be found at http://www.waxlyricalgames.com/.

About the Reviewer

Francesco Sapio obtained his computer science and control engineering degree from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, with a couple of semesters in advance, scoring summa cum laude. Now he is studying a master's of science in artificial intelligence and robotics.

He is a Unity3D expert and skilled game designer, as well as an experienced user of the major graphics programs.

Recently, he authored the book Unity UI Cookbook (Packt Publishing), which teaches readers how to develop exciting and practical user interfaces for games within Unity. Furthermore, he has also been a reviewer for the book Unity Game Development Scripting (Packt Publishing).

Francesco is also a musician and composer, especially for soundtracks of short films and video games. For several years, he worked as an actor and dancer. He was a guest of honor at the Brancaccio theatre in Rome.

In addition, he is a very active person, having volunteered as a children's entertainer at the Associazione Culturale Torraccia in Rome. Also, he gives private lessons in mathematics and music to high school and university students.

Francesco loves math, philosophy, logic, and puzzle solving, but most of all, creating video games—thanks to his passion for game designing and programming.

You can find him at https://linkedin.com/pub/francesco-sapio/b8/5b/365.

I'm deeply thankful to my parents for their infinite patience, enthusiasm, and support throughout my life. Moreover, I'm thankful to the rest of my family, in particular, my grandparents as they always encouraged me to do better in my life with the Latin expressions Ad Maiora and Per aspera ad astra.

Finally, a huge thanks to all the special people around me whom I love, in particular, my girlfriend; I'm grateful for all your help with everything.

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Preface

Video games are a cultural phenomenon that has captivated, entertained, and moved billions of people worldwide over the past fifty years. As an industry and movement, video games are an exciting place to be, both for the developer and the artist. In these roles your vision, ideas, and work can influence wide audiences, shaping and changing generation after generation in an unprecedented way. In more recent times, there's been a general movement towards democratizing game development, making the development process simpler, smoother and more accessible to a wider audience, including developers perhaps working from home on a very limited budget. Instrumental in this movement is the Unity engine, which forms the main subject of this book. The Unity engine is a computer program that works with your existing asset pipeline (such as 3D modeling software) and is intended for compiling video games that work seamlessly across multiple platforms and devices, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Using Unity, developers import ready-made assets (such as music, textures, and 3D models), and assemble them into a coherent whole, forming a game world that works by a unified logic. Unity is an amazing program. The latest version is free for most people to download and use, and it works well with many other programs, including free software such as GIMP and Blender. This book focuses on the Unity engine and how it can be used in a practical context for making playable and fun games. No prior knowledge of Unity is expected, although some knowledge of programming and scripting (such as JavaScript, ActionScript, C, C++, Java, or C#) would be beneficial. Let's now take a look at what this book covers, on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

What this book covers

This book explores how to use the Unity engine in a hands-on, practical way by looking at concrete examples that result in real-world playable games. Specifically, it focuses on the implementation of four distinct projects divided across eight chapters, two chapters per project. Let's take a look at what these projects are:

Chapter 1, The Coin Collection Game – Part 1, begins our journey into Unity by creating a first-person collection game. This is a great starting point if you're totally new to Unity and are ready to create your first game.

Chapter 2, Project A – the Collection Game Continued, continues from the previous chapter and completes the first project. It assumes that you have completed the first chapter and brings a closure to our project, leading neatly to the next chapter.

Chapter 3, Project B – the Space Shooter, marks the beginning of our second project, focusing on the creation of a space shooter game. Here, we'll create a project in which the player must shoot the oncoming enemies.

Chapter 4, Continuing the Space Shooter, completes the space shooter project, taking the project from its state in the previous chapter and adding final touches to it.

Chapter 5, Project C – a 2D Adventure, enters the world of 2D and UI functionality. Here, we'll explore Unity's wide range of 2D features in making a side-view platformer game that relies on 2D physics.

Chapter 6, Continuing the 2D Adventure, completes the 2D adventure game project that was started in the previous chapter, adding the final touches and linking it together with the overarching game logic. This is a great place to see how multiple parts and facets of a game come together to form a whole.

Chapter 7, Project D – Intelligent Enemies, focuses on artificial intelligence and creating enemies that can patrol, chase, and attack the player's character at relevant times, while cleverly navigating their way around the level.

Chapter 8, Continuing with Intelligent Enemies, brings closure to the AI project started in the previous chapter, as well as to the book content as a whole. Here, we'll see how to use finite-state machines to achieve powerful intelligence functionality that'll help us in a variety of scenarios.

What you need for this book

This book contains almost everything you need to follow along. Each chapter considers practical, real-world projects for learning Unity, and includes companion files which can be downloaded and used. The only thing you need, apart from this book and your concentration, is a copy of the latest version of Unity. At the time of writing, this is Unity 5.3.1. This software is available for free as a personal edition, and can be downloaded from the Unity website, here: https://unity3d.com/. In addition to Unity, if you want to create props, character models, and other 3D assets, you'll also need 3D modeling and animation software, such as 3DS Max, Maya, or Blender; you'll also need image editing software, such as Photoshop or GIMP. Blender can be downloaded and used for free here: http://www.blender.org/. And GIMP can be downloaded and used for free here: https://www.gimp.org/.

Who this book is for

This book is ideally suited to readers with no prior experience of Unity or game development and who are considering game development as a hobby or a career. You will typically have some basic knowledge of programming or scripting, perhaps in contexts outside game development, in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, ActionScript, Python, or another object-oriented language. In addition, you should have at least some basic idea of core game development concepts; for example, I'll assume you know what a 3D model is, what a texture is, what an audio file is, and what an executable file is. I take these concepts to be foundational. They will be touched upon on this book briefly, but not elaborated on or explained in depth. Here, we'll focus on Unity as software, as a tool for building real-world games. Each chapter reads as an in-depth tutorial, assembling a functioning product that you can expand upon and play.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: The environment created thus far for the coin collection game has been assembled using only the mesh assets included with the native Prototyping package.

A block of code is set as follows:

using UnityEngine;

using System.Collections;

public class Coin : MonoBehaviour

{

  // Use this for initialization

  void Start () {}

  // Update is called once per frame

  void Update () {}

}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

using UnityEngine;

using System.Collections;

public class Coin : MonoBehaviour

{

  // Use this for initialization

  void Start () {

Debug.Log (Object Created);

  }

  // Update is called once per frame

  void Update () {

  }

}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: You'll need to create New Project.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Downloading the example code

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Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.

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Questions

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Chapter 1. The Coin Collection Game – Part 1

This chapter starts the first project on our list, which will be a fun collection game. Remember, it doesn't matter if you've never used Unity before. We'll go through everything necessary step by step. By the end of the next chapter, you'll have pieced together a simple, but complete and functional, game. This is an important thing to achieve because you'll get familiar with a start-to-end game development workflow. This chapter will demonstrate the following topics:

Game design

Projects and folders

Asset importing and configuration

Level design

Game objects

Hierarchies

Game design

Let's make a coin collection game. Here, the player should control a character in the first-person mode, and he must wander the level, collecting all coins before a time limit runs out. If the timer runs out, the game is lost. On the other hand, if all coins are collected before the timer expires, the game is won. The first-person controls will use the default WASD keyboard setup, where W moves forward, A and S move left and right, and D walks backward. Head movement is controlled using the mouse, and coins are collected by simply walking into them. See Figure 1.1, featuring the coin collection game in action in the Unity Editor. The great benefit in making this game is that it demonstrates all the core Unity features together, and we don't need to rely on any external software to make assets, such as textures, meshes, and materials.