Preface

Everyone wants to make a game—today, this is possible more than ever due to the democratization of the game industry and the tools that are used to design and develop games. This book is written with several purposes in mind. During the process of writing this book, Unity went through several major updates and releases. At the time of writing, Unity stands at version 2018.1.1f1, and the new release has added many great features to the game engine. Simply put, it is impossible to cover everything in one single book!

This book is intended as a reference guide for individuals who want to learn about Unity and apply their skills for the creation of a Role-Playing Game (RPG).

Who this book is for

This book is written for individuals who want to learn and apply their Unity skills for the creation of an RPG. It is assumed that the reader has a basic understanding of the concepts of programming and is comfortable with the basics of Unity's IDE. This book gives a strong and solid foundation of the core concepts and topics that can be applied to build your own game experience.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, What is an RPG?, provides a good background of what an RPG is. It covers some historical aspects and gives examples of existing RPGs. It discuss the main aspects of an RPG, covers some terminology, and prepares the reader for the rest of the book.

Chapter 2, Planning the Game, is where we take a look at character definitions, character class attributes, character states, and how to set up and rig character models, which includes an exploration of motion, controllers, and inverse kinematics.

Chapter 3, RPG Character Design, continues expanding on player character customization and looks at preserving character states, the setup of Non-Player Characters (NPCs), and introducing NPC Artificial Intelligence (AI) and interaction.

Chapter 4, The Game Mechanics, is where we start planning the game. We discuss the different types of assets and resources we will need during the creation of our game, introduce a third-person character controller, and create our initial level and scripts. We also take a look at the Terrain Toolkit for terrain generation.

Chapter 5, GameMaster and Game Mechanics, looks at enhancing the Game Master script, introduces Level Controller and Audio Controller scripts, discusses the storage of character data and the character customization state, and explores options for the initial user interface for the main menu.

Chapter 6, Inventory System, covers the creation of a generic inventory system; the creation of the necessary scripts, assets, and prefabs that represent the inventory items; designing the inventory user interface; and how to represent the inventory system and its items.

Chapter 7, User Interface and System Feedback, discusses the design and implementation of a heads-up display, player character information panel, and the active inventory items panel. The special inventory items panel is designed and implemented, as are the non-player character health bar and UI.

Chapter 8, Multiplayer Setup, discusses multiplayer programming using Unity's Unet architecture. This chapter illustrates the concepts using two sample projects. The initial project is a tank game that illustrates the concepts of server client and data synchronization. The second project applies what we have learned to create a scene supporting our character models.

To get the most out of this book

You will need to have a good understanding of the C# language. You will also need to have a good understanding of the basics of the Unity IDE.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

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Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

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The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Building-an-RPG-with-Unity-2018-Second-Edition. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/BuildinganRPGwithUnity2018SecondEdition_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system."

A block of code is set as follows:

using UnityEngine; 
using UnityEngine.SceneManagement; 
 
namespace com.noorcon.rpg2e 
{ 

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."

 

Note

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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