Richard Leggett on New Media

I’ve just finished reading Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone (Packt Publishing). First a quick lowdown on what Unity itself is for those not familiar:

Unity (website) is an integrated development environment for Windows and Mac designed to allow hobbyists and professionals alike to create fully-featured games that can be deployed on the web, on the desktop (Mac and PC) and a growing number of consoles and devices including iPhone, Wii and soon XBox 360 (I’d be stunned if Android isn’t in the pipeline). It now comes in two flavours, free and pro. The free edition has some limitations such as a splash screen logo and certain advanced rendering techniques are not available (more info here). It supports a wide variety of file formats for models, textures and sounds, and games can be scripted in either JavaScript or C#, or indeed both.

In a nutshell, this book takes the reader through the basic concepts associated with building games in Unity, from manipulating objects in 3D space, importing assets, collision detection and scripting events, all the way through to putting it all together in an island-themed game which is built up of several mini games. Those of you who know Unity know that the Tropical Island Demo that really blows other web-ready 3D plugins out of the water.

Introducing the various elements in these mini-games is a nice way to introduce the various layers of features Unity provides, and it fits in well with how Unity is built, which allows novices to import and customise pre-made components through simple inspectors, but also allows professionals to create and script entirely custom elements. This makes for a gentler learning curve and plenty of play along the way, which should keep you from getting bogged down with too many new things too soon.

Having read through all of the bundled online documentation before, it’s clear to see this book manages to strike a good balance between being a reference and a guided tutorial, which makes it a much friendlier read without sacrificing important detail. It’s always tricky to pick up a new tool that has so much to it because you’re faced with a wall of many new terms. What’s a “RigidBody", a “Collider", a “Material” compared to a “Texture". I found the book gave very good short summaries of all of these things as we encountered them, and this greatly speeds up learning because you can quickly refer back to these pages whilst they set in.

To give you an idea of just what is covered in the book, here’s a list of the main topics:

• The concepts and terms used in Unity and 3D games in general.
• Setting up a level, terrain and an environment/world.
• Adding controllable players.
• Scripting interactions between objects and players.
• Creating re-usable assets and dynamically instantiating them.
• Using the physics engine (to make a coconut shy game!)
• Using the particle systems.
• Designing a menu and GUI interaction.
• Packaging it all up for web, desktop and dashboard widget.

This is a very brief summary of what’s included, of course there’s plenty more around this. I enjoyed reading this, so I can imagine Will enjoyed writing it. I would be happy to recommend this to any level of reader, although you’ll clearly have a far easier time if you already know a programming language, particularly if you already know ActionScript or JavaScript (there are a few Flash analogies given). So if you have some spare time coming up over the holidays this is a great way to expand your skills whilst having fun with particle emitters and explosions.

You can buy the book at Packt Publishing as a hard-copy or eBook, and you can find Will at http://learnunity3d.com/.