Getting Started with Unity 5 [eBook]

Preface viii Chapter 1: Getting Jiggy with the Unity Interface 1 Why Unity? 2 Getting your hands on Unity 3 Projects 4 Layouts 7 Views 10 The Scene view 11 The Game view 11 The Hierarchy view 12 The Project view 13 The Inspector view 14 Transform tools 14 Cameras 17 Summary 18 Chapter 2: Creating the Game Environment 19 Game design 20 Game look 20 Player objectives 20 Gameplay 21 User actions 21 Artificial Intelligence 22 End state 23 Terrain 23 Creating the terrain 24 Adding mountains 26 Adding a river 26 Textures 27 Table of Contents [ ii ] Additional environmental features 32 Natural bridge 32 Planting trees 33 Water 38 Creating the sky 40 Summary 42 Chapter 3: Working with Assets 43 Assets 44 Asset packages 46 Unity Asset Store 49 Adding assets to your game 50 Using the Unity Asset Store 50 Importing a custom asset package 56 Importing the game characters 56 Importing the buildings 57 Using Blender to create assets for your game 57 Summary 59 Chapter 4: Animating the Game Characters 61 Animation basics 61 Character controllers 62 First person controller 63 Creating a third person controller 64 Animating player characters 73 Little farmer Colt 74 Old farmer character 75 Farm animals 75 Previewing animations 75 Creating animation clips 77 Summary 81 Chapter 5: Scripting the Game 83 C# programming primer 84 Syntax 84 Naming conventions 85 Class, function, and method names 85 Camel case 85 Abbreviations 85 Special characters 86 Data types 86 Using MonoDevelop 86 Scripting with C# in Unity 87 Start and update functions 91 Table of Contents [ iii ] Scripting example 91 Unity scripting assets 92 Scripting our game 93 Script planning 94 Gathering corn 94 Gathering water 95 Feeding piglets 95 Feeding baby chicks 97 Feeding pigs 97 Feeding adult chickens 97 Data requirements 97 All about the pigs 98 Chicks and chickens 100 Corn and water 101 Initializing our data 103 Selective scripts 103 Selective script – global variables 103 Selective script – evoking the take animation 104 Selective script – feeding the farm animals 105 Organizing scripts 106 Summary 107 Chapter 6: Adding a Graphical User Interface 109 An overview of GUI 110 Functions of a GUI 110 Feedback 111 Control 112 Feedback and Control 113 Game Layers 113 Unity 5's UI system 114 Canvas 114 Render mode 115 Creating a GUI 115 HUD 116 Creating an HUD 116 Mini-maps 120 Creating a mini-map 120 Game navigation 123 Summary 128 Chapter 7: Polishing and Optimizing the Game 129 Sight and sound 130 Unity's sound capabilities 130 Audio listener 130 Audio clips 131 Audio source 132 Table of Contents [ iv ] Implementing sound effects 133 Visual effects 134 Spotlight orb with halo effect 135 Casting shadows 137 Trail rendering 139 Rendering options 142 The Profiler window 142 Rendering optimization 143 Imposing limits 144 Baking images 144 Optimizing scripts 145 Summary 147 Chapter 8: What's Next? 149 Improving our game 149 Audio 150 Visual effects 151 Functionality 153 Levels 154 Project management 154 Unity workflow 154 Art and animation 154 Scripts 155 Other assets 155 Scaling projects 155 Development concepts 156 Cross-platform considerations 156 Plugins 156 Attribution 157 Advanced topics 157 Particle systems 157 Inventory control systems 159 Dialog systems 159 Summary 160 Index 161