Preface

I still remember that moment of my life when I was afraid of telling my parents that I was going to study game development. At that time, in my region, that was considered a childish desire by most parents, and a career with no future, but I was stubborn enough not to care and to follow my dream. Today, game development is one of the biggest industries, generating more revenue than film.

Of course, following my dream was more difficult than I thought. Anyone with the same dream as me sooner or later faces the fact that developing games is a difficult task that requires a deep level of knowledge in different areas. Sadly, most people give up due to this difficulty level, but I strongly believe that with the proper guidance and tools, you can make your career path easier. In my case, what helped me to flatten the learning curve was learning to use Unity.

Welcome to this book about Unity 2022. Here, you will learn how to use the most recent Unity features to create your first videogame in the simplest way possible nowadays. Unity is a tool that provides you with powerful but simple-to-use features to solve the most common problems in game development, such as rendering, animation, physics, sound, and effects. We will be using all these features to create a simple but complete game, learning all the nuances needed to handle Unity.

If you have read the 2021 edition of this book, you will find that not only have the contents been updated to the latest Unity and Packages versions, but also new content has been introduced in 2022, such as coverage of the new Input System.

By the end of this book, you will be able to use Unity in a way that will allow you to start studying in depth the areas of game development that you are interested in to build your career or simply create hobby games just for the joy of doing it. Unity is a versatile tool that can be used in both professional and amateur projects, and is being used every day by more and more people.

It is worth mentioning that Unity can be used not only for creating games but for any kind of interactive apps, from simple mobile apps to complex training or educative applications (known as Serious Gaming), using the latest technologies such as Augmented or Virtual Reality. So, even if we are creating a game here, you are starting a learning path that can end in lots of possible specializations.

Who this book is for

People with different backgrounds can take advantage of the whole book or parts of it thanks to the way it is structured. If you have basic OOP knowledge but have never created a game before, or have never created one in Unity, you will find the book a nice introduction to game development and Unity basic to advanced concepts. You could also find most parts of this book useful even if you are a seasoned Unity developer who wants to learn how to use its latest features.

On the other side, if you don’t have any programming knowledge, you can also take advantage of the book, as most of the chapters don’t require programming experience to learn from them. Those chapters will give you a robust skillset to start learning coding in Unity, making the process easier than before reading them, and once you learn the basics of coding, you can take advantage of the scripting chapters of this book. Also, with the introduction of Visual Scripting, you will have an alternative language if you are more comfortable with node-based scripting.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating a Unity Project, teaches you how to install and set up Unity on your computer, and also how to create your first project.

Chapter 2, Editing Scenes and GameObjects, teaches you the concepts of Scenes and GameObjects, the Unity way to describe what your game world is composed of.

Chapter 3, Working with Scenes and Game Objects, is where we will be creating our first level layout, prototyping it with the Terrain and ProBuilder Unity features.

Chapter 4, Importing and Integrating Assets, is where we will be creating our first level layout, prototyping it with the Terrain and ProBuilder Unity features.

Chapter 5, Introduction to C# and Visual Scripting, is the first programming chapter of the book. We will learn how to create our first script using C# in the Unity way, and then we will explore how to do the same with Visual Scripting, the new node-based coding language of Unity. The rest of the programming chapters will show how to code the game in both languages.

Chapter 6, Implementing Movement and Spawning, teaches you how to program the movement of your objects and how to spawn them. This chapter introduces the new Unity Input System. General programming knowledge is assumed from now on.

Chapter 7, Physics Collisions and Health System, teaches you how to configure the Physics settings of objects to detect when two of them collide and react to the collision, creating a health system, in this case.

Chapter 8, Win and Lose Condition, covers how to detect when the game should end, both when the player wins and loses.

Chapter 9, Implementing Game AI for Building Enemies, covers creating a basic AI using several Unity features for creating challenging enemies in our game.

Chapter 10, Materials and Effects with URP and Shader Graph, shows how to use one of the latest Unity render systems (Universal Render Pipeline, or URP) and how to create effects with the Shader Graph feature.

Chapter 11, Visual Effects with Particle Systems and Visual Effect Graph, teaches you how to create visual effects such as water and fire using the two main Unity tools for doing so, Particle Systems and VFX Graph, and how to make scripts that control them according to what’s happening in the game.

Chapter 12, Lighting Using the Univeral Render Pipeline, looks at lighting, which is a concept big enough to have its own chapter. Here, we will deepen our knowledge of the Universal Render Pipeline, specifically its lighting capabilities.

Chapter 13, Fullscreen Effects with Postprocessing, teaches you how to add a layer of effects on top of your scene graphics using the postprocessing feature of the Universal Render Pipeline to get that film effect most modern games have today.

Chapter 14, Sound and Music Integration, covers a topic that is underestimated by most beginner developers; here we will learn how to properly add sound and music to our game, taking into consideration its impact on performance. This also covers how to script the sound.

Chapter 15, User Interface Design, looks at the User Interface (UI). Of all the graphical ways to communicate information to the user, the UI is the most direct one. We will learn how to display information in the form of text, images, and life bars using the Unity UI system, and also how to script the UI.

Chapter 16, Creating a UI with the UI Toolkit, looks at UI Toolkit, which is the successor of Canvas, the UI system we learned about in Chapter 15, User Interface Design. We will explore it to get ahead and be prepared for Unity’s use of this HTML-based toolkit in the future.

Chapter 17, Creating Animations with Animator, Cinemachine, and Timeline, takes us further than the static scene we have created so far. In this chapter, we will start moving our characters and creating cutscenes with the latest Unity features to do so, and how to script them.

Chapter 18, Scene Performance Optimization, discusses how making our game perform well is no easy task, but is certainly needed to release it. Here, we will be learning how to profile our game’s performance and tackle the most common performance issues.

Chapter 19, Building the Project, teaches you how to convert your Unity project into an executable format to distribute it to other people and run it without Unity installed.

Chapter 20, Augmented Reality in Unity, teaches you how to create an AR application with Unity’s AR Foundation package, one of the most recent ways to create AR applications with Unity.

To get the most out of this book

You will be developing a full project through the chapters of this book, and while you can just read the chapters, I highly recommend you practice all the steps in this project as you advance through the book, to get the experience needed to properly learn the concepts demonstrated here. The chapters are designed so you can customize the game and not create the exact game shown in the book. However, consider not deviating too much from the main idea.

The project files are split into a folder per chapter and are designed in a cumulative way, each folder having just the new files introduced by the chapter or the changed ones. This means, for example, that if a file hasn’t change since Chapter 1, you won’t find it in Chapter 2 onward; those chapters will just use the file introduced in Chapter 1. This allows you to see just what we changed in each chapter, easily identifying the needed changes, and if for some reason you can’t finish, for example, Chapter 3, you can just continue with Chapter 4’s steps on top of Chapter 3. Also note that Chapters 15 to 19 will have two versions of the files, the C# ones and the Visual Scripting ones.

Software/hardware covered in the book	OS requirements
Unity 2022.1	Windows, macOS X or Linux (any)
Visual Studio 2022 Community	Windows or macOS X (any)
XCode 13	macOS X

While we will see how to use XCode 13, is not required for most of the chapters. Also, there are alternatives to Visual Studio in Linux, like Visual Studio Code.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

The code bundle for the book is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Unity-2022-Game-Development-Third-Edition. 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://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781803236919_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. For example: “Set its shader to Universal Render Pipeline/Particles/Unlit.”

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. For example: “Create a new empty GameObject (GameObject | Create Empty).”

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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