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Description

The intuitive and powerful Unity game engine is one of the most widely used and best loved packages for game development. Unity scripting is an essential but challenging skill to master in order to create custom game elements. Learning modular scripting allows you to rewrite as little code as possible as you deploy your scripts to multiple projects and work easier, quicker, and more efficiently than before. In each chapter of this book, you'll learn how to script new game elements. Beginning with making custom controls for the keyboard and mouse, as well as the Xbox 360 Controller, you'll then get to grips with more complex systems such as inventory, data saving, and artificial intelligence. As you create these elements, you'll also learn how to make your scripts simpler and easy to use. This will allow drag-and-drop deployment, which is to be used by designers and nonprogrammers. Finally, you'll combine all of your newfound skills to create your own complete game project.

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MR B BYFORD Feb 16, 2015

Hugely useful overview of various game design has its and how they can work in unity.Got this after the 2d game development in unity book, and was please at how it built on my knowledge and didn't spell things that I already knew. Not for absolute beginners.

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Mário Freitas Mar 01, 2015

The book is written in very concise and simple to understand way, guiding the reader the whole way to actually create a simple working game, and covering most topics on game development scripting.I would highly recommend this book to people who are new to Unity scripting and to those who would like to learn more about how to structurally and conceptually organize a game from the point of view of game development scripting.The book also offers standard approaches to the implementation of features that are present and required in any game.

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Peter Matthew Apr 30, 2015

As a Lecturer in Games Development I am always on the lookout for books that can help my students improve their understanding of both c# and Unity3d. This book provides a lot of very good tutorials and explanations that cover a variety of subjects within the games development area. The sections are clearly written and provides good examples of the code being discussed. After discussing the book with some of my second year students they described it as “very helpful” and “easier to understand than a lot of other books”.Some criticisms of the book are that the sections are a little abstract in places jumping from topic to topic and it relies on a previous understanding of coding knowledge to get the most out of it, therefore lending itself more to an intermediate or advanced user.Regardless the author does an excellent job of explaining useful scripts that most games developers will want to include: such as re -bindable controller settings and user interface development, therefore providing the reader with a practical set of scripting examples.I would recommend this book for anyone wanting to improve their understanding of Unity scripting and my department is now using this book as part of our essential reading list for all second year games programmers.

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Robert L. Dixon Feb 07, 2015

I read a lot of books about Unity and C# since I'm always trying to up my game, so to speak. This book has some good sections but overall doesn't cohere as well as it could. But it could be useful for people with some Unity experience who are looking for specific techniques.It jumps right into scripting individual subsystems without talking about what kind of game is going to be built and how everything will fit together. Later on you learn the example game is an RPG-style game with characters, weapons and objects. It would have been nice to know this ahead of time, because some of the chapters are only relevant to this type of game.Overall this is more like a "cookbook" of various recipes, as opposed to a step-by-step guide to building a real game. If you already have some experience coding C# in Unity, and you are interested in some of the chapter topics, you should find the book useful.Here's a brief rundown on some specific chapters:* The first chapter on Interactive Input present a nice technique for switching among input control schemes. However there's an emphasis on supporting the XBox 360 controller which might not be relevant to a lot of developers.* The GUI chapter relies a little too heavily on the old, mostly obsolete Unity GUI approach, so it is not too useful in the post-Unity-4.6 world.* The Expandable Item Classes chapter presents a nice starting point for structuring in-game items that affect player characters and objects.* The chapter on AI covers two different AI topics: simple enemy decision-making (switching an enemy object among Idle, Guard, Combat, Flee states), and pathfinding. The pathfinding section gives a good introduction to Unity's NavMesh system, which is not covered in many other books. The example for this chapter uses the AI scripts to animate some freely-available skeleton models (from the Asset Store) around an environment.* The chapter about Keeping Score on the other hand presents some real brute-force coding with hard-coded achievement thresholds and such. There are better and simpler ways to code this, so I would give this chapter a pass.* The same could be said for the next chapter, which covers Saving and Loading Data. It uses XML, which is generally heavier and harder to work with than JSON, and again shows some brute-force coding that might not hold up well over time.* Chapter 8 deals with audio and offers some simple, reusable classes for managing and playing sounds.* The final chapter, "Putting It All Together," builds a simple game by assembling all the subsystems from previous chapters. It's very nice to see all the parts working together at the end. This chapter could have been fleshed out a bit more. It would have been nice to have an overview, like a diagram, of how all the subsystems fit together, rather than a step-by-step "now add this, now add this" sequence. In fact this kind of overview would have been really useful prior to Chapter 1, so the reader can go into the rest of the book knowing what to expect.Overall there are a lot of things to learn from this book. In addition there is a nice emphasis on play-testing at the end of each chapter, with suggestions of ways to enhance the examples in your own games. But it's not a complete guide to building your own games in Unity.

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Matthew Feb 09, 2015

Bottom line up front, this book is a great tool to keep in your kit bag. With a basic knowledge of programming and Unity, I started an indie game development company with several game ideas in mind. What I quickly discovered was, like most things in life, there are multiple ways to accomplish a single task within Unity. This created a challenge I hadn’t planned for. Originally I thought it would be difficult to find the right literature to help me achieve my goal, but instead I found that I was inundated with information. I recently came across “Unity Game Development Scripting” by Kyle D'Aoust and became quite pleased with what I had found. The book is laid out in a very efficient manner covering all the major aspects of creating a game. The first chapter deals with the most important aspect, defining user input. It lays out two options one for keyboards and the other for an Xbox controller. At first glance the reader may be tempted to think this doesn’t apply to me because I’m not developing for those platforms. This may be true, but if the reader looks deeper they will start to see how the techniques used in the book can transfer into other projects. The process the writer took to define different aspects and requirements for control are useful when designing the controls for all games. Chapters 5 and 7 are also great examples of a situation where the techniques used are beneficial to any reader attempting to develop a game in Unity. I have personally struggled with scripting enemy artificial intelligence in a 2D platformer game and have waffled between different techniques. After reading chapter 5, I was able to add a more efficient solution to my games even though the writer is referencing 3D game creation. In addition, chapter 7 answers the question of saving game progress. When I first started developing games this task perplexed me, but “Unity Game Development Scripting” by Kyle D'Aoust does an excellent job of defining C# scripting that accomplishes the task. Though I was overall happy with this book, there was one point of contention I had with the way it was written. The author provides numerous coding examples written in C# throughout each chapter. He does a good job giving a description after each block of coding, but I found it to be rather taxing on the mind to connect the explanations with the code previously read. A better way to accomplish this would have been to add comments directly into the code itself. This would have personally helped me better follow the readings. Again, this book is an excellent tool for any developer to have. If you don’t have an intermediate understanding of programming and Unity, you will probably find this book to be frustrating as it is not a tutorial based piece of work. But if you are looking for a resource to help refine and/or add to your own techniques for game development then this is the right place to start.

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Unity Game Development Scripting: Write efficient C# scripts to create modular key game elements that are usable for any kind of Unity project

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