Before you start your project, you should consider how you intend to set it up and architect your project in the long term. Far too many developers have created problems for themselves by just diving in rather than designing the outline for the project at the start.

Your game and your assets are not the only things to consider when starting a fresh project. Sure, you can start importing assets, creating scripts, and getting things running; most Proof of Concept (POC) projects start this way. Once your project is of a sufficient size and you start expanding on your initial concept, you'll realize that you have issues with regard to picking up items and putting them together. Then, you will start devising new ways to organize your project and eventually find that it's an unmanageable mess; nevertheless, you will stride on, taking longer and longer to produce new content or add new features.

The best advice one can give is to think about your entire project and...

Before you can start building the game in Unity, you need to start a new project. Select New at the top of Unity's Home Screen. When creating a 2D game, you want to ensure that you start the project in 2D mode by selecting the appropriate mode in the Unity's home screen, as shown in the following screenshot:

Unity's home screen

After selecting Create project, you'll be brought to the Editor Window, as shown in the following screenshot:

Unity's Editor window

It's important to note that when you create a new project in Unity, you are creating a new folder that can be accessed through File Explorer (Windows) or the Finder (Mac OS X) with the following subfolders:

Now that we have created our project, let's create the folder structure for the project, as shown in the following screenshot and discussed previously...

Every level or distinct area you create within Unity will be an individual scene. So, the start screen will be a scene, the town will be a scene, the map will be a scene, and so on.

We will have the following scenes in our game:

When you start a new project in Unity, you will be given a blank scene that contains only a camera, as shown in the Hierarchy in the following screenshot:

The initial scene will be unsaved, as you can see by the word Untitled in the area above the toolbar preceding the name of the project:

To save the scene, select File | Save Scene. The first location we will design will be the town, so let's save the scene as Town.unity in the Scenes folder we created, as shown in the following screenshot:

You should now see the scene showing up in your Assets folder and you will see the word Untitled replaced with Town, as shown in the following screenshot...

It's hard to get excited about a game project until the visual elements are in the scene. We will discuss how to bring our character in the game shortly, but first let's go over how to actually use Sprites in Unity. A brief overview of working with Sprites is given in the previous chapter, but now we will get more technical.

Importing sprites

The simplest way to import a sprite into a scene is to simply drag it from your File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac OS X) into Unity's Project Window. Once the image file is brought into the project, clicking on the image will show its various import settings in the image's Inspector, as shown in the following screenshot:

Image Inspector on Project window

Let's take a closer view at the various import settings of an image brought into a 2D project and discuss each of the properties. Here, I will discuss each setting presented in the following screenshot; however, I will discuss the Sprite Editor button a later section:

Note

If you make...

In Unity, every object in your scene will be a GameObject. A GameObject in itself isn't much other than a container for holding a list of Components. Components are the individual properties that make a GameObject unique. When a GameObject is selected, you can view each of its Components from its Inspector.

The most basic GameObject is an empty GameObject, which will contain no components other than a Transform. The Transform component is essential to each GameObject, as it allows it to have a physical location, rotation, and scale in the scene, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can create other types of GameObjects by selecting from a list of possible GameObject, starting with and empty one and adding individual components, or adding components to a provided GameObject.

Since we are working in 2D, the majority of our GameObjects will be a Sprite GameObject.