Chapter 8. What's Next?

With our Little Farmer Colt game fully developed, we can look at ways you can improve the game once you put the book down. You'll gain inspiration to make the game your own with additional content, functionality, and levels.

In the second section of this chapter, we'll look at project-related issues including workflow with Unity projects and how to scale projects. In the third section, we'll look at development issues including cross-platform considerations, plug-ins, and attribution issues.

In the chapter's final section, we'll look at several advanced topics including particle systems, an inventory control system, and a dialog system.

After reading this chapter, you will:

• Understand ways to improve the Little Farmer Colt game

• Understand Unity's workflow

• Understand how to scale projects

• Understand cross-platform issues

• Understand the importance of attribution

• Have an appreciation for advanced topics

Improving our game

We can be proud of our game, but there is not much for a game player to get excited about once they've played the game for a while. Here are some suggestions to make our game more robust and more enjoyable for users to play.

Audio

Together, we added sound effects for pigs crying and a "points" sound when Colt takes corn or water. The following are some opportunities for additional audio in the game:

• Background music: A subtle background clip played on a loop will go a long way to making the game more immersive. We created something that is appropriate for the game environment. Be sure to review the priorities you set for each audio clip.

• Animal sound effects: Ideally, each animal could have three sounds, idle, eating, and drinking. The "pigs crying" sound effect we already added to our game would work for the pig and piglet idle clips. Adding the additional sound effects will help make the game seem more real and add an element of fun.

• Old farmer: Currently, the old farmer...

Project management

When developing games in Unity, you'll want to ensure you have a project management plan mapped. The adage of the larger the team, the greater the need, is certainly appropriate for developing with Unity. As you've seen with our Little Farmer Colt game, the number of assets in even a small project can quickly add up. If you are an indie developer, you do not need to be overly concerned about project management, but if you have two more people on your team, I recommend taking a few moments to determine your project's workflow.

Unity workflow

There is no ideal or perfect workflow for working with Unity. Every team does things a bit differently. So, instead of suggesting a specific workflow, I'll mention a few important parts of any workflow and suggest methods of approaching them.

Art and animation

Typically, the team members that work on art and animation are different from those that write the scripts. It stands to reason that the art and animation team (or teams) should be...

Development concepts

There are a few things worth talking about as you make your way through the last couple of pages of this book. The concepts of cross-platform considerations, plugins, and attribution are covered in this section.

Cross-platform considerations

You can create multiplayer games and have users on Android and iOS devices playing with or against one another. To accomplish this, you can use something such as Google Play's games services.

Another consideration is the various screen sizes of mobile devices. Apple has a finite number of mobile devices using iOS, but Android runs on a lot more different screen sizes and resolutions. You do not have to create one version for every screen size. Instead, you'll need to consider relative layouts and flexible dimensions.

As always, test your game on as many different devices as you can and be sure to vary operating system versions, screen sizes, and screen resolutions. In absence of actual hardware for testing, use software emulators.

Plugins...

Advanced topics

This entire chapter could have been named advanced topics. And this section could be additional advanced topics. In this section, we'll take a quick look at particle systems, inventory control systems, and dialog systems.

Particle systems

Unity includes an impressive capability to render particles in games. We use particles to represent dynamic visuals such as fog, smoke, fire, sparks, pixie dust, and more. You can think of particles as multiple tiny images in motion. Think of a fireworks display. They consist of hundreds of tiny lights all in motion. Using Unity's particle system, we can replicate this type of imagery.

To implement a particle system in Unity, navigate and select GameObject | Particle System from the top menu. This will result in a Particle System object being placed in your Hierarchy. Reviewing the Particle System in the Inspector view shows a host of settings that can be used to change how the particle system functions and is rendered.

If you plan to implement...

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at ways to improve our Little Farmer Colt game. Suggested improvements were grouped into audio, visual effects, functionality, and levels. We also looked at workflow project-related issues including workflow with Unity projects, how to scale projects, and how to manage multi-person team projects.

You also learned about development issues, which included cross-platform considerations, plugins, and attribution. We ended the chapter by looking at a few additional advanced topics. Specifically, we looked at particle systems, an inventory control system, and a dialog system.

Enjoy your journey developing games with Unity!