Building an RPG with Unity 2018: Leverage the power of Unity 2018 to build elements of an RPG. , Second Edition

As discussed, building a role-playing game is no small task, but once you start down the path, you will come to the realization that it is not as difficult as it seems initially. The idea is to get started, and as you put your ideas down on paper and start the design process, more and more ideas will come into perspective.

As we have learned, there are some key elements that we will need to establish for our RPG. Let's recall them, and maybe even fine-tune them as we go along.

Our game's key elements are as follows:

The premise of most role-playing games tasks the player with saving the world. There are often twists and turns as the story progresses, such as the surprise appearance of an estranged relative, or enemies who become friends and vice versa. We will create our story and game based on such a story.

Now is a good time to discuss some of the basic assets that will be required for the development of our RPG. Our game assets are defined by the scenes we describe for our game. For our RPG, we have described four unique scenes. Each one has been described in enough detail for us to get an idea of the types of assets we will require.

Now that we have our game story on paper and have an idea of what we want to achieve, it is time to apply our skills to actually making it happen.

To get started, we need to launch Unity. I am using the 64-bit edition of Unity 2017.x Pro. You do not need to have the Pro version of Unity to complete the project in this book. See the following screenshot:

Go ahead and select a location and a name you desire for your project, and click the Create project button. At this point, Unity will create an empty project for you and display the Unity IDE. It should look something like the following:

New project

Your view might be a bit different, depending on how you have configured...

At some point, you will want to test out the level and look at it through the eyes of the camera. We can use the built-in third-person character controller that comes in the Standard Assets and do a quick walk-through of the level.

In your Project window, you will see a folder called Standard Assets; there is a subfolder called Character Controllers. You will need to select the 3rd Person Controller Prefab and drop it somewhere on the current scene. A good location is next to the shack. Make sure that the 3rd Person Controller (3rdPC) is above the terrain so it does not fall through!

You will have to attach a Rigidbody component to the 3rdPC GameObject. This is needed to make sure that our player-character (PC) uses the built-in physics for collision detection.

Before you run the level, let's make sure the camera...

Now is a good time to create the starting point for our game. Go ahead and save the current scene. We will make a new scene that will be used as the starting point of our game. To create the new scene, you will need to select File | New Scene. Go ahead and save the scene. I called my scene MainMenu.

Now we have a clear canvas that we can work with to create our Main Menu. In the Hierarchy window, right-click and select UI | Panel. This will create a Canvas GameObject and an EventSystem GameObject, and place them in your Hierarchy window. You will notice that the Panel UI Object is a child of the canvas. All UI elements will be a child of a canvas. Your Hierarchy should look something like the following screenshot:

There are several key aspects that we want to make sure are set properly. These are namely on the Canvas GameObject. Select the Canvas GameObject and look at the Inspector Window.

For this particular canvas, make sure that the Render Mode is set to Screen Space...

As discussed in Chapter 1, What is an RPG?, we will need a way to manage our game. We will create a script called GameMaster. This will be the core of the game that glues everything together. As we progress with the book, you will see how we will modify the core to meet our needs.

For now, we are just going to create a simple C# script and name it GameMaster.cs. We will then create the code that will be used to handle some of the basic events we want to perform at this point, namely, navigating from scene to scene.

From your Project Window, under your scripts folder, right-click and select Create | C# Script. Name it GameMaster.cs. Double-click your script to start your code editor and place the following code in there:

using UnityEngine; using UnityEngine.SceneManagement; namespace com.noorcon.rpg2e { 
   public class GameMaster : MonoBehaviour 
   { 
 
// Use this for initialization 
      void Start() 
      { 
 
      } 
 
      // Update is called once per...

In this chapter, we have established a good sense of the RPG. We have defined our levels and the settings for each level, and defined clear objectives for each level and the outcome for each level. We also took the first level, called Awakening, and created the environment. We looked at how to use our assets and the Asset Store to incorporate 3D models in our scene. We also looked at how to plan the layout of the level. We introduced a third-person character controller into the scene to help us visualize how the level looks from the player's perspective and help us fine-tune it as needed.

Here is a list of the assets that were used for the design of this level:

By the end of the chapter, we also developed our Main Menu scene and our initial GameMaster script that will be used to glue the core of the game together. In the next chapter, we will start creating...