About this Book

This is a book about programming games in Unity. Think of it as an intro to Unity for experienced programmers. The goal of this book is straightforward: to take people who have some programming experience but no experience with Unity and teach them how to develop a game using Unity.

The best way of teaching development is through example projects, with students learning by doing, and that’s the approach this book takes. I’ll present topics as steps toward building sample games, and you’ll be encouraged to build these games in Unity while exploring the book. We’ll go through a selection of different projects every few chapters, rather than one monolithic project developed over the entire book; sometimes other books take the 'one monolithic project' approach, but that can make it hard to jump into the middle if the early chapters aren’t relevant to you.

This book will have more rigorous programming content than most Unity books (especially beginners’ books). Unity is often portrayed as a list of features with no programming required, which is a misleading view that won’t teach people what they need to know in order to produce commercial titles.

Don’t worry about the exact programming language; C# is used throughout this book, but skills from other languages will transfer quite well. Although the first half of the book will take its time introducing new concepts and will carefully and deliberately step you through developing your first game in Unity, the remaining chapters will move a lot faster in order to take readers through projects in multiple game genres. The book will end with a chapter describing deployment to various platforms like the web and mobile, but the main thrust of the book won’t make any reference to the ultimate deployment target because Unity is wonderfully platform-agnostic.

As for other aspects of game development, extensive coverage of art disciplines would water down how much the book can cover and would be largely about software external to Unity (for example, the animation software used). Discussion of art tasks will be limited to aspects specific to Unity or that all game developers should know. (Note, though, that there is an appendix about modeling custom objects.)